Don Bachardy, Self-portrait, 2004 Don Bachardy:The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
“Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits,” a retrospective exhibition on the prolific Los Angeles artist, will feature more than 100 works of art and archival materials spanning over 70 years. The show runs from April 12, 2025, through August 4, 2025.
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.
“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.
