GLR January-February 2026

The exhibition included Opie’s provocative early self-por traits such as Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), which focuses on a crude drawing of two female stick figures in front of a house carved into Opie’s back, with the contours still bleeding. Opie wears a black hood in Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) , with nee dles in her arms and the word “Pervert” carved in oozing letters across her bare chest, an image that was presented alongside Goya’s Portrait of Ferdinand VII . The harshness of these pho tos was counterbalanced by the sweetness of Self-Portrait/Nurs ing (2004), which shows Opie gazing lovingly at her son as she breastfeeds. This was ingeniously shown with Bellini’s TheVir gin with Standing Child . The catalog beautifully reproduces her resplendent photo graphs and their complementary paintings. Insightful essays dis cuss Opie’s performative staging of issues related to gender, taboo, and the construction of identity, all within the context of familial intimacy. While this body of work represents only a portion of the artist’s œuvre, the exhibition and the catalog af firm her essential contribution to queer representation. _________________________________________________________________ John R. Killacky, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.

D ALE B OYER Diverging Visions SITE SPECIFIC: New & Selected Poems by Elaine Sexton Grid Books. 192 pages, $24. HOVER by Liza Flum Omnidawn. 92 pages, $19.95 O NE OF THE VIRTUES of having a poet’s œuvre en capsulated in a volume of selected poems is the oppor tunity it affords not only to evaluate their output but also to see how certain themes have developed over time. Elaine Sexton writes beautifully crafted and understated poems whose concerns appear to be remarkably consistent across more than two decades of published work. They also resonate all the more

Portrait Artist Don Bachardy Tells All ARTIST’S PROFILE

C HRIS F REEMAN W AY BACK IN THE 1990s, when James Berg and I began thinking about compiling a book on the life and legacy of Christopher Isherwood, we realized that we had to include Don Bachardy’s story, as the two really were and are fully intertwined. So a section of our first book, The Isherwood Century , is called “Artist and Companion.” Now Michael Schreiber has produced a comprehensive interview-based biography of Bachardy, who is 91 years old, titled Don Bachardy: An Artist’s Life (Citadel Press). Bachardy met Isherwood at the beach in Santa Monica, California, in the early 1950s. His life, from growing up in subur ban Los Angeles in the classic Hollywood era to becoming a world-renowned portrait artist in his own right, is one of the unlikeli est stories imaginable. And yet it happened, and now it is told, in intimate detail, in Don’s own words. After reading the book, I corresponded with Schreiber to get his take on this significant story and how it came into being. Chris Freeman: How did you get the idea to do a project with Don Bachardy? Michael Schreiber: I first arrived on Don’s doorstep about a dozen years ago merely as the friend of an old acquaintance of his, the fellow artist Bernard Perlin, who had en couraged me to “look up Donny” when I

was visiting Los Angeles. Don was gracious enough to receive me. While I had some art-related questions for him at that first meeting, what forged our friendship was discovering that we’re both passionate fans of the Golden Age of Hollywood. As our conversations about art and movies and Don’s extraordinary life continued by phone and during my frequent trips to L.A., this oral history project began to grow organi cally. What has ultimately emerged with this book is, fittingly, a portrait of Don Bachardy, taken from his later life—or, rather, three intertwined portraits of his identities as a lifelong movie fan, as Christopher Isherwood’s legendary partner, and as an acclaimed portrait artist. CF: Who is your target audience, and how much do they need to know about Isher wood and Bachardy to get into it? MS: Certainly a wide swath of the older gay generation is at least somewhat familiar with Isherwood’s work and his and Don’s fabled love story. But I don’t presume that younger readers across the LGBTQ + spec trum are aware of just how trailblazing a couple they were, or what an extraordinary figure Don is as an artist in his own right. My hope is that this book finds its way into their hands, and into those of other-identify ing readers as well. The many Hollywood tales in the book are certainly its enticing sugar coating, but sweeter still is the tremendous love story it tells. Although

some of this story has already been well documented, my book presents Don’s fresh, late-in-life perspectives on it all, along with a lot of previously untold material about his own life before and since the advent of Ish erwood in it.

CF: Don describes himself in one of your conversations as “an artist of personality.” What can you say about this concept? Is that perhaps some aspect of his approach that re ally distinguishes his work and his legacy? MS: It absolutely is. Don stands uniquely apart as an artist for having committed the entirety of his seven-decade career to por

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