{"id":5081,"date":"2009-09-16T23:05:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T03:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=5081"},"modified":"2009-09-16T23:05:22","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T03:05:22","slug":"keepin-it-mad-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=5081","title":{"rendered":"Keepin’ It Mad Real."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"7487_01_d03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Bechtle’s 1974, 48 in. by 69 in. oil, Alameda Gran Torino<\/em><\/a>, is a masterpiece of the photorealistic style he mastered in the 1960s and ’70s.<\/p>\n

In his 2005 review of the artist’s work<\/a>, The New Yorker<\/em>‘s Peter Schjeldahl called Bechtle’s images visions “from a prior life,” and Alameda Gran Torino<\/em>, paradoxically, “a nova of banality.”<\/p>\n

The station wagon can\u2019t help but be only and exactly what Detroit fashioned. Hot sunlight can\u2019t help but glint from a bumper and produce a faint reflection of the windshield on a garage door. A closeness between the green of the car and that of a background shadow is unusual, but so perfectly meaningless that your mind may panic at the waste of its energy in beholding the fact. Then something peculiar can happen: your reflexive sense of the picture as a photograph breaks down, and the object\u2019s identity as a painting, done entirely on purpose, gains ground. Look closely. A congeries of tiny freehand strokes delivers an inconspicuous patch of foliage. The whole work is a feat of resourceful painterly artifice. At last, it\u2019s as if the original photograph were a ghost that died and came back as a body.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And what a body it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Bechtle’s 1974, 48 in. by 69 in. oil, Alameda Gran Torino, is a masterpiece of the photorealistic style he mastered in the 1960s and ’70s. In his 2005 review of the artist’s work, The New Yorker‘s Peter Schjeldahl called Bechtle’s images visions “from a prior life,” and Alameda Gran Torino, paradoxically, “a nova of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,35,33,64,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5081"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5247,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081\/revisions\/5247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}