Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits
Don Bachardy (b. 1934) is known for creating distinctive portraits of generations of artistic, literary, and film personalities. The exhibition will include more than 100 graphite and acrylic works on paper, many of which have never been exhibited, as well as contextualizing archival materials including letters and photographs. The portraits and archival materials are drawn from Bachardy’s archive at The Huntington, select loans from private collections, and Christopher Isherwood’s papers, which Bachardy placed at The Huntington in 1999. The exhibition is curated by Dennis Carr, Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington, and Karla Nielsen, senior curator of literary collections at The Huntington, with guest curator Gregory Evans. The Huntington will publish an illustrated catalog with essays to accompany the exhibition.
Ted Bachardy, Don and Marilyn Monroe, 3 1/2 × 3 1/2 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Don Bachardy, Letter to Christopher Isherwood January 26, 1964, 1964 January 26, 9 1/2 × 5 15/16 in. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 1964.
Unknown, Chris and Don on Catalina Trip, 1976, 4 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. Christopher Isherwood Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
David Hockney, Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood, 1968 March 30, 3 1/2 × 5 in. Christopher Isherwood Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Photo credit: David Hockney. © David Hockney.
Don Bachardy, Isherwood, Christopher 06-20-79, 1979, acrylic on paper, 26 × 20 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 1979.
Don Bachardy, Martin, Crystal 03-05-03, 2003, 26 × 20 in. Howarth & Smith Collection. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 2003.
Don Bachardy, Baldwin, James 01-23-64, 1964, pencil and ink, 29 × 23 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 2018.
Don Bachardy, Hilton, Tim 05-30-17, 2017, acrylic on paper, 29 × 23 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 2017.
Don Bachardy, West, Jennifer, 1963, pen and ink, 22 1/2 × 17 1/2 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 1963.
Don Bachardy, Self-portrait 08-08-18, 2018, acrylic on paper, 29 × 23 in. Don Bachardy Papers. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Don Bachardy, 2018.
“We are thrilled to celebrate and share with the public Don Bachardy’s lifelong commitment to the art of portraiture with this retrospective,” Nielsen said. “Over 70 years he has produced a tremendous body of work, documenting friends and strangers, luminaries, and neighbors. Bachardy’s portraits provide visitors with a view of Los Angeles through his eyes.”
The Santa Monica household that Bachardy kept with his long-term domestic and romantic partner, renowned British American writer Christopher Isherwood, was legendary for the glamour and reputations of its visitors. Both Isherwood and Bachardy documented this world and their relationship in their art. Works on view in the exhibition were selected from some 17,000 portraits by Bachardy, and many represent the couple’s illustrious social circle, which included Truman Capote, Bette Davis, and David Hockney, among others. While some portraits may not have been flattering, the sitters were invariably pleased, believing that Bachardy had captured their essence. Bette Davis famously said of her portrait, “There’s the old bag!”
Bachardy began drawing in his teens and continues to work to this day. He partly attributed his interest in working with people to his passion for movies. The exhibition will include snapshots that Bachardy and his brother took with film stars at movie premieres, which they crashed as teenagers. These photographs offer a unique look into Bachardy’s early years, capturing memorable moments with such Hollywood icons as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe, among many others.
Working primarily in graphite and acrylic to capture his sitters, Bachardy creates his portraits in single sessions of two to three hours. Isherwood, who was Bachardy’s first live sitter in 1953, often sat for the artist over the years, including in the final months before he died in 1986. The exhibition includes many of Bachardy’s portraits of Isherwood. A section in the exhibition will highlight their creative partnership through letters the couple wrote to each other and collaborative creative projects, such as the book October.
“At a time when many American artists were focused on abstraction or conceptual art, Don was committed to drawing from life, a craft he honed through making thousands of portraits over the decades,” Carr said. “We intend to trace key moments from his fascinating biography alongside his artistic evolution—most dramatically, his shift from intense, intimate monochromatic portraits to his bold use of color.”
Spanning more than 70 years, “Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits” will be organized chronologically and thematically, showing a range of work from each decade of the artist’s career.
Don Bachardy and The Huntington
The Huntington began a relationship with Bachardy in 1999, when he entrusted the Library with Christopher Isherwood’s archive. The Huntington committed to acquire Bachardy’s archive as well, so that it could reside adjacent to and complement Isherwood’s. Since then, The Huntington has been dedicated to supporting scholarship, conferences, talks, and related programming inspired by the dynamic creative couple. In 2004, The Huntington exhibited 34 of Bachardy’s portraits in “Celebrities, Friends, and Strangers: Portraits by Don Bachardy.” The Huntington honored Bachardy in 2014 at its inaugural An Evening Among the Roses, an annual garden party celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. The Huntington’s Isherwood-Bachardy lecture series, launched in 2016, has featured guest speakers Robert Chattel, Alvin-Christian Nuval, and Nels Youngborg (“Object of My Nostalgia: Designating the Isherwood-Bachardy Residence and Studio in Los Angeles”); Tom Ford (“Filming Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man from the Page to the Screen”); Pico Iyer (“In Isherwood’s Footsteps: Seeing the World in the Round”); Robert Flynn Johnson (“Skill, Speed, and Diplomacy: The Artistic Achievement of Don Bachardy”); Matthew Spender (“Isherwood, Auden, and Spender: Before the Second World War”); and Edmund White (“Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man”).
Exhibition Catalog
The Huntington will publish a richly illustrated exhibition catalog titled Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits to accompany the exhibition. The hardcover book of 160 pages includes an interview with the artist by Gregory Evans, as well as essays by Katherine Bucknell, James Cahill, Simon Callow, and Mary Agnes Donoghue. The book will be available April 12, 2025, at the Huntington Store or online at thehuntingtonstore.org.
Related Programs
April 11, 2025
A sneak preview of the new documentary about Don Bachardy, by filmmaker Tina Mascara, will screen at The Huntington.
April 23, 2025
The Isherwood-Bachardy 2024–2025 lecture will be delivered by Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and W. H. Auden’s literary executor.
About the Artist
Don Bachardy was born in Los Angeles in 1934. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. His first solo exhibition was held in 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London. Throughout Bachardy’s seven-decade career, subsequent solo exhibitions have been presented in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and New York. His portraits are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco; University of Texas; UCLA; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the California State Capitol; the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and The Huntington. His portraits have been published in nine books: October, in collaboration with Isherwood (Twelvetrees Press, 1980); One Hundred Drawings (Twelvetrees Press, 1983); Drawings of the Male Nude (Twelvetrees Press, 1985); A collection of seventy drawings of artists, 70 X 1 (Illuminati, 1983); Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (Faber and Faber, 1990, Great Britain; 1991, USA); Short Cuts: The Screenplay, by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt with portraits by Don Bachardy (Capra Press, 1993); Stars in My Eyes (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Hollywood (Glitterati Incorporated, 2014); and Nudes (Glitterati Incorporated, 2017).
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Douglas and Eunice Erb Goodan Endowment and the Robert F. Erburu Exhibition Endowment. Additional funding is provided by The Ahmanson Foundation Exhibition and Education Endowment, The Melvin R. Seiden-Janine Luke Exhibition Fund in memory of Robert F. Erburu, and the Boone Foundation.