Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy
Bachardy at 19 – Photo by Carl van Vechten (January 1954)
Birth name	Donald Jess Bachardy
Born	May 18, 1934 (1934-05-18) (age 77) Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Field	Portrait artist

Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California.

Life and work

Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he met on Valentine's Day 1953, when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48. They remained together until Isherwood's death in 1986. A number of paperback editions of Isherwood's novels feature Bachardy's pencil portraits of the author. A film about their relationship, titled Chris & Don: A Love Story, was released in 2008.

Bachardy studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. His first one-man exhibition was held in October 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London.

Since that time he had many one-man exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. More recently, he had an exhibition at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, in 2004–2005.

His works reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum of Art in San Francisco, the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institute, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Six books of his work have been published. His life and works are also documented in Terry Sanders' film The Eyes of Don Bachardy. He collaborated with Isherwood on Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). His book Stars in My Eyes (2000), about celebrated people whom he had painted, became a best-seller in Los Angeles.

Bachardy's portrait of California Governor Jerry Brown.

One of Bachardy's most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Governor Jerry Brown hanging in the California State Capitol. (The California state official biography page for Governor Jerry Brown features a photograph of the painting.)

Most recently, Bachardy made a cameo appearance in the movie A Single Man (starring Colin Firth) based on Isherwood's book of the same name—he portrays a professor in the teacher's lounge, to whom Firth says "Hello. Don."^[1] Bachardy told Angeleno Magazine in their December 2009 issue: "Chris got the idea for that book when he and I were having a domestic crisis. We'd been together 10 years. I was making a lot of trouble and wondering if I shouldn't be on my own. Chris was going through a very difficult period (as well). So he killed off my character, Jim, in the book and imagined what his life would be without me."

Bachardy still lives in Isherwood's Santa Monica home (his place of residence for over 50 years), where he paints portraits for gallery shows and on a commission basis. In January 2010 he showed a retrospective of self portraits (from 1959–2009) at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica.^[2] In Fall of 2011, Bachardy exhibited portraits made over the last 40 years depicting acclaimed artists from Southern California, including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha at Craig Krull Gallery in conjunction with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time.

Works

• Frankenstein: The True Story. 1973 (with Christopher Isherwood)
• October / O. Methuen, London 1983 (with Christopher Isherwood), ISBN 0-413-50040-3
• One Hundred Drawings. Twelvetrees Press, Los Angeles 1983
• 70 x 1 Drawings. Illuminati, 1983
• Drawings of the male nude. Twelvetrees Press, Pasadena 1985, ISBN 0-942642-18-X
• Christopher Isherwood: Last drawings. Faber and Faber, London/Boston 1990, ISBN 0-571-14075-0 (mit John Russell, Stephen Spender)
• Short cuts: the screenplay. Capra Press, Santa Barbara 1993 (with Robert Altmann, Frank Barhydt), ISBN 0-88496-378-0
• The Portrait. Imprenta Glorias, 1997
• Stars In My Eyes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2000, ISBN 0-299-16730-5

Bibliography

• Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (2004)
• Daniel Curzon: Remembering Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. In: Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly. Volume 6 (2004), Issue 1
• Chris & Don: a Love story (2008)^[3]
• Lee Prosser: Isherwood, Bowles, Vedanta, Wicca, and Me, (2001), ISBN 0-595-20284-5

References

1. ^ Eric Gutierrez Tom Ford was right about Isherwood. The Times. February 5, 2010
2. ^ [1]^{[dead link]}
3. ^ Thomas, Kevin. (2008-06-29) Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy: a personal and artistic union. latimes.com. Retrieved on 2011-08-02.

External links

• The Eyes of Don Bachardy (American Film Foundation)
• Portraits by Don Bachardy
• Nudes by Don Bachardy
• Don Bachardy at Craig Krull Gallery
• Oral history interview with Don Bachardy, 2009 May 21 – Oct 7 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Persondata
Name	Bachardy, Don
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	May 18, 1934
Place of birth	Los Angeles, California
Date of death
Place of death