PARKED CARS.(Bay Area artist Robert Bechtle)

I first encountered the underrated Bay Area artist Robert Bechtle's great painting " '61 Pontiac" (1968-69), which is in his present retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in a 1969 group show in New York. It was among the early examples of Photo-Realism, a populist, generally lightweight movement that flourished beyond the pale of that time's strivingly serious art world, where recondite postminimalism ruled. The painting was as good as American Photo-Realism would get: a vision of and about life in these United States as telling as little else since Edward Hopper, and a philosophically rich interplay of painting and photography that brings to mind Gerhard Richter. Seven feet wide, on three abutted panels, " '61 Pontiac" shows the artist and his family standing beside a creamy-white station wagon on a surburban street in the midday sunlight. The source is obviously a photograph--Bechtle had begun to work with slides projected onto canvas. Neatly bearded, subdued Dad, in a short-sleeved business shirt and baggy corduroy trousers, rests a hand on the head of his restive young son, in short pants and sneakers. Sturdy, long-haired Mom, her eyes in deep shadow, holds their uninterested little girl and smiles. She may be speaking. Details are slightly blurry, testifying to the snapshot's loss of definition when blown up to such a size. Of course, it isn't possible to describe a painting--a tissue of decisions--as "blurred." So the artist's faithfulness to the vagaries of photography is part of the picture's form and significance.

I remember being rattled by the middle-class ordinariness of the scene. For one thing, it was the last sort of image that one expected from the vicinity of San Francisco in that epoch of hippie revolutionizing. But the work did not feel conservative. Untouched by either sentiment or irony, it seemed, as it still does, entirely unconcerned with its own approximation of an American demographic ideal. Gradually, you register that it is beautiful. Translated into oil paint, the Kodachrome colors of flesh, grass, and Mom's striped skirt take on sumptuous, dreaming intensity. Though derived from the click of a camera, the image has none of what Roland Barthes termed a photograph's "punctum," its quotient of inaccessible pastness. In " '61 Pontiac," time balloons forward, backward, and sky-high. I sense the droning, sheer duration of days in suburban neighborhoods in mild climates, an immensity laced with a familiar terror: boredom, our foretaste of being dead. Nothing can happen there. Or something can--a family of four pauses beside a station wagon, whose predictability makes matters worse. In this and many subsequent works, Bechtle is a fascinated diver in the ocean of interminable American afternoons.

The Whitney Museum bought the painting in 1970, but Bechtle's career--managed in New York by the insouciantly commercial O.K. Harris gallery--attracted almost no further critical attention. The local avant-garde was in one of its "painting is dead" phases and was automatically dismissive of things Californian anyway. Meanwhile, the work's equable take on bourgeois America suggested a different country from the infernal regions ritually evoked by counterculturalists. Today, when most art of 1969 is snugly historical, " '61 Pontiac" stays fresh. That's because the spiritual realities that it channelled have not changed. The problem of how to live in this land, as it actually is, has outfaced all attempts to escape or transcend it. And the benumbing domination of our visual culture by cameras, of one kind or another, is as urgent a challenge to painting now as it was when Andy Warhol wedded mechanical imagery to high art four decades ago. Bechtle exploits the strangeness in humdrum photographs of the obvious, and he does so with the sort of reticent, stubborn grace that marks most of the Bay Area's finest painters--David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud.

Now seventy-two years old, Bechtle was born and grew up in the Bay Area, the son of a teacher mother and an electrician father who, during the Depression, resorted to selling door to door. ("Hoover ...