Don Bachardy will forever be identified with novelist and diarist Christopher Isherwood, who discovered him on a Santa Monica beach in 1953 when Don was 18 years old, and became his patron and lover for life.
Isherwood encouraged Bachardy's significant talents and opened golden doors for him at a time of iconic “glitterati” in Hollywood, sharing a life in the company of legends — Garbo & Maugham, Auden & Spender, Gerald Heard, Krishnamurti & Swami Prabhavananda — to skim just the shining surface of their circle.
In his early 70s now, Bachardy went on to paint portraits of well-known and diverse subjects such as Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, James Merrill, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mapplethorpe, Aldous Huxley, and many others.
In the late 1980s Bachardy created portraits of a dozen gay rights leaders: Elaine Noble, Frank Kameny, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Morris Kight, Charles Bryden, James Foster, Bruce Voeller, David B. Goodstein, Jean O’Leary, Rev. Troy Perry, and Barbara Gittings. In 1995, the series was donated to the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library. Bachardy recently painted life partners, Gay Spirit author Mark Thompson and the Rev. Canon Malcolm Boyd. His drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the M.H. de Young Museum of Art (SF), the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the California State Capitol Building (the official portrait of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr.), the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Don Bachardy will forever be identified with novelist and diarist Christopher Isherwood, who discovered him on a Santa Monica beach in 1953 when Don was 18 years old, and became his patron and lover for life.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήIsherwood encouraged Bachardy's significant talents and opened golden doors for him at a time of iconic “glitterati” in Hollywood, sharing a life in the company of legends — Garbo & Maugham, Auden & Spender, Gerald Heard, Krishnamurti & Swami Prabhavananda — to skim just the shining surface of their circle.
In his early 70s now, Bachardy went on to paint portraits of well-known and diverse subjects such as Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, James Merrill, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mapplethorpe, Aldous Huxley, and many others.
In the late 1980s Bachardy created portraits of a dozen gay rights leaders: Elaine Noble, Frank Kameny, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Morris Kight, Charles Bryden, James Foster, Bruce Voeller, David B. Goodstein, Jean O’Leary, Rev. Troy Perry, and Barbara Gittings. In 1995, the series was donated to the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library. Bachardy recently painted life partners, Gay Spirit author Mark Thompson and the Rev. Canon Malcolm Boyd. His drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the M.H. de Young Museum of Art (SF), the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the California State Capitol Building (the official portrait of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr.), the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery in London.