For 40 years, I’ve been visiting artist Don Bachardy at his home on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. Prior to one recent visit, as he had done each time before, he gave me precise directions about making the turn down the alley off westbound San Vicente. When I pulled up and went inside, he was in his living room awaiting my arrival.
This was last winter, before the fires, before Bachardy and so many of his neighbors heeded the evacuation warnings, before the flames raked up nearby canyons and smoke clouded the air along the beach. Fortunately, his house survived the Palisades conflagration. Now 90, Bachardy stands with perfect posture and speaks with a public school accent rubbed off from his decades of living with Christopher Isherwood, the English-born author of The Berlin Stories, a pair of novels from the 1930s that was the basis for various versions of Cabaret. Isherwood’s success made him the star of the couple’s relationship, even after his death in 1986. Yet it is the artist who will take the spotlight—long overdue—this April when Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits opens at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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With more than 100 works and many archival materials, the retrospective spans 70 years and is the largest presentation of Bachardy’s art to date. Even so, it represents a fraction of the 17,000 works, mostly portraits but also his papers, that the painter is giving to the institution, which also owns Isherwood’s archives. “So we will be a duo as we have been for so many years. And that just pleases me a lot,” Bachardy says with a little chuckle. “I have so much of him around me in my studio and very much inside me. I still miss him so much, but I think of him such a lot that it helps the missing him.”
Curator Gregory Evans, a longtime friend of both men, worked with the Isherwood Foundation to make the initial selections for the exhibition, while the Huntington’s Dennis Carr, the chief curator of American art, and Karla Nielsen, senior curator of literary collections, fine-tuned the picks. Bachardy himself was also quite involved. “I really do think I’m the best person to choose the work,” he says. “I am a true artist. I follow my instinct.”
L.A. STORIES
Presented chronologically and thematically, the exhibition contains a range of work from each decade of Bachardy’s career accompanied by archival materials. These documents include black-and-white photographs of a teenage Bachardy with Marilyn Monroe and with other film stars taken at movie premieres he’d snuck into, revealing his early fascination with the glamour of Hollywood, a realm he came to inhabit with Isherwood. The relationship between Bachardy and Isherwood is captured in a 1968 photo of them sitting together by David Hockney, which was the basis for his insightful painted double portrait of them.
Though Bachardy is renowned for his portraits of celebrities, writers, and artists, the curators were keen to include his representations of ordinary people, identifiable by the signature of each sitter that Bachardy always requested (a practice that also turned his work into a personal autograph album). These pieces offer a meaningful detour from the usual “Chris and Don” story that inspired the 2007 documentary of the same name by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi (their portraits are in the show). Mascara is now at work on a film solely about Bachardy.
In the Huntington exhibition, Bachardy’s snappy illustrative style of the 1950s gives way to one using elegant, delicate lines in pencil and ink. Later, after Isherwood’s death, Bachardy made a big turn toward color by using thin washes or bold, even aggressive, strokes of bright acrylic paint. His subjects track his friendships: Early pencil-and-ink drawings of Isherwood colleagues Igor Stravinsky and James Baldwin are followed by those of close friends, especially fellow artists Peter Alexander and Billy Al Bengston. Yet Bachardy, working almost daily, required more sitters than were in his social circle. He drew many people who were neither acquaintances nor well-known personalities, some of whom he presented clothed and some of them not. When he met a potential candidate, he might say, “Call me—my number is in the phone book.”
Nielsen emphasizes that the exhibition is unique for the depth of materials available to choose from. “You have 70 years of work and, through meeting Chris, so many people who were much older. Don ends up capturing five generations of people in Los Angeles. It’s a truly remarkable span of human experience, an array of people born in the 1980s and going back to the early 20th century.”
Carr adds that the show bridges the Huntington’s different collections—portraits, Bachardy, Isherwood—to “tell the story of Hollywood, the story of Los Angeles from the 1960s onward.” Bachardy’s drawings covertly chronicle shifting societal attitudes toward same-sex relationships, from early works reflecting a slightly open-closet stance to later, more flamboyant works demonstrating a greater acceptance of them. In 2009, fashion designer Tom Ford made a film based on Isherwood’s book A Single Man, which was drawn from the period of a breakup in the couple’s relationship.
Carr explains Bachardy’s approach: “He decides early on that he wants to devote himself to painting portraits from life, all in one sitting. So he compresses his artistic practice to this moment so that he captures the dialogue between sitter and artist. He did choose a different direction than many of his peers, but he perfects it.”
AWESTRUCK ENCOUNTERS
Seated on the sofa in the Adelaide house that has been his home since 1956—and which he shared with Isherwood—where the walls are hung salon-style with art by longtime friends like Hockney, Bachardy succinctly describes his singular obsession: “I’ve always been interested in people, faces, personalities.”
He continues, chuckling a little again as he shares a memory. “It began very early because my mother [Glade Bachardy] was a devoted moviegoer and she took her two sons with her, and our father never knew.”
For Bachardy, riding the streetcar from their home in Atwater Village to the palatial downtown theaters for a showing at 9:30 in the morning and coming back before his father returned from his job at Lockheed lent a sense of adventure to the outing. These frequent trips also provided him with hours of looking at faces on a giant silver screen and absorbing their every detail.
Hollywood stars were Bachardy’s first subjects, copied from movie magazines and traced from photos—a technique also used by his older brother, Ted. It was Ted who was initially involved with Isherwood, but he didn’t want a relationship with the writer. Bachardy was more inclined. “Ted got busy with his younger friends; I got busy with Chris,” Bachardy says with a laugh. Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood 48.
As Bachardy learned to draw people from life, not photographs, he explored the complexities of their emotions, those that might be deeply felt and those that passed superficially. In 1953, Isherwood became his first live sitter. “Each time I did something I was really pleased with, he was right there telling me how good it was,” recalls Bachardy. “He was as sophisticated as anyone can be. He taught me how to not be intimidated. He was a very good critic, too.”
Isherwood had had his own rebellious instincts, rejecting his upper-class heritage and dropping out of Cambridge. He joined his friend poet W.H. Auden in 1920s Berlin. His diaristic fiction was based on the raucous Weimar atmosphere of sexual liberation and was later adapted for stage and screen. With Auden, he immigrated to L.A. in 1939, part of a wave of wartime European exiles. By the time he met Bachardy, he was recognized as a successful novelist and screenwriter.
On one of Bachardy and Isherwood’s first dates, at a restaurant near Columbia Pictures, Montgomery Clift walked up to their table to say hello. Bachardy recalls, “I was absolutely awestruck.” It was his first proper meeting with a movie star but not his last. While working on screenplays, Isherwood would invite Bachardy to lunch at the studio and introduce him to actors like Marlene Dietrich and Natalie Wood, who later posed for him. “Chris was always so encouraging. He put me through four years of art school.”
Bachardy attended Chouinard Art Institute, where he studied alongside artists who were at the forefront of L.A.’s emerging scene. He also studied at the Slade School in London and had his first show at the Redfern Gallery there in 1961. He went on to exhibit with Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, as well as galleries in L.A., San Francisco, New York, and other cities, and several museums include his work in their permanent collections.
SITTING STILL
What does a portrait reveal? Painters have long relied on commissions, but the transaction has been complicated by the desires of both parties. To flatter is to be the lesser artist, while unflinching representation may have far worse consequences. With the advent of photography, the worry of how to depict a sitter realistically might seem unnecessary. But the concern remains for subjects and the painters seeking to capture them.
That is how I met Bachardy: writing a feature for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1982 on how it felt to have artists do my portrait in different media—photography, sculpture, drawing, and painting. At his Adelaide Drive studio, he agreed to make two portraits, which meant I had to sit for two and a half excruciating hours. I wrote of the experience, “My body twitches and settles, then resumes its spasms. My mind meanders through forests of melancholy and clearings of hope. It is a meditative time. I mention this to Bachardy, who notes, ‘I get the most startling results from people when they sit for me, because for the first time in their lives they’re sitting still and finding out what’s going on in their heads. Often, at the end of the sitting, they feel transformed. Not from any interaction with me, but because they were miles away.’ ”
His portrait of me in tones of black and gray ink washes was more flattering than the one done in color, which was brash and expressive. And upsetting. Both versions illustrate the problem: the artist’s intention versus the sitter’s expectation. Many people would assume that this chasm would scare away those who trade on their appearance—politicians, actors, models—from sitting for Bachardy. But the quality of his work and his occasionally acerbic charm seem to have won them over time and again. Looking at her portrait, Bette Davis quipped, “There’s the old bag!” Bachardy was commissioned to paint the official portrait of former governor Jerry Brown in 1984. Angelina Jolie’s mother commissioned nudes of every phase of the actor’s first pregnancy.
Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, who was painted in 1983, recalls, “It’s really the only time I’ve ever had the experience of being closely observed for an extended period of time. It’s a really disconcerting experience. Of course, you know, you always hate the result. But it’s this strange kind of visual communication between two people.” The result, a boyish likeness, happens to be in the Huntington show.
Knight points out that when Bachardy began making his art, figurative work was secondary to abstraction and then to conceptualism. “It’s interesting now to look back on his commitment to a genre that was not about public popularity,” he says. “It was about his interest as an artist and his devotion to what he wanted to do. That’s something that’s totally admirable.”
PORTRAITS AS PORTALS
Early in “A Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930,” a chapter in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, he writes, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” His writing is sharp, terse, witty. Nielsen says the Bachardy show reveals startling similarities. “Both had a documentary aesthetic, a clear style but a truthfulness each in their own media, Chris in his writing and Don in his portraits.”
When Isherwood died, 33 years after their first encounters, Bachardy sat with his body and drew his changing likeness. “That was the most memorable experience. Being all alone with him from morning to late at night, just doing it over and over again. I started around 11:30 in the morning and didn’t finish until after 11 at night. His face began to change until it hardly looked like him at all. I don’t know of any artist living or dead who ever did that,” he says. The drawings of Isherwood’s passing, a significant memorial, were published later as part of a book called Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood.
In the Huntington exhibition, there are two drawings by Bachardy from 1959, one a self-portrait, the other of Isherwood. The two men both age, picture by picture, throughout the show. Bachardy portrays himself staring intensely, eyes enhanced, as he did with many of his subjects. He likes to say that he always starts with the eyes. It’s tempting to compare his portraits to stylized Byzantine iconography, with eyes as portals to the soul.
The passing of life has to be accepted, but the question remains, How to carry on? “I needed to work,” Bachardy says. “I was an artist who worked all day most days. Because Chris was my example. He made me know what a real artist was. The more I did, the better I got. It gives you a reason to live. And if I could survive his loss, I could do anything.”
As I write this, I think back on my visits to Adelaide Drive and Bachardy’s grief over Isherwood, and of the Palisades fire that threatened his home, displaced thousands, and killed many. Bachardy’s words about survival are full of resolve and—in some inexplicable way—seem appropriate for this moment. I feel hope from Bachardy telling me, “I was so determined to keep my painting up. I was determined to be survived by a lifetime of work.”•
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the author of Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s and Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, has written numerous books and articles on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on California and the West. They can be found at hunterdrohojowska-philp.com.
