Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits

“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, “Yup, that’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”).

Related Programs

Auden and Isherwood: Religion versus Friendship

May 1, 2025, 7:30 p.m. | 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.

Evening Among the Roses

June 13, 2025 | The 11th annual An Evening Among the Roses is a chance to recognize and celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer members of the community for their many contributions to The Huntington.

Culture Writing Workshop: Don Bachardy

July 23, 2025 | A culture writing workshop inspired by the work of Don Bachardy led by activist artist, culture writer, and instructor Candace Hansen.

Member’s Documentary Preview

July 24, 2025 | A member’s only preview of a new documentary about Don Bachardy, by filmmaker Tina Mascara.

Bette Davis Film Screening

July 29. 2025, 7 p.m. | A screening of a classic Hollywood film starring Bette Davis, and influential figure on Don Bachardy in his youth. 

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 Pasadena Art Alliance, 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.