GLR March-April 2026

While Isherwood Was Off Writing...

D ON BACHARDY’S prolific sixty-year career as an artist— his body of work encompasses about 17,000 portraits—would be reason enough for a 400-page book about him. Most noted for his superbly limned drawings of just about every major Hollywood star, he has also published sev eral volumes of his pictures and seen his

Schreiber often prods him to say more, and Bachardy genially complies. When Anne Baxter sat for her portrait, she was “just so actressy that it was all so phony.” Charles Boyer was “nasty to me,” Joan Crawford “all teary and graciousness.” As for Katharine Hepburn: “You wouldn’t think an actress would be so eager to look like a drama queen!” The names that fill these in

P HILIP G AMBONE

DON BACHARDY AnAr ti st’s Life by Michael Schreiber Citadel. 416 pages, $29.

terviews constitute a who’s who in the world of film, art, dance, and literature. Without exaggeration, merely listing every well known name that Bachardy mentions would take up all the space allotted for this review. Apart from the talk about these celebrities, Bachardy has many interesting things to say about making art. He says he feels a responsibility to be interested in everyone who sits for him. “I’ll take on anybody as a subject, but on the basis that I don’t know at the start what I’m going to do. ... The surprise of looking at somebody in the way that I look at him or her is what I build the whole experience on.” Calling himself an “artist of

work accepted in important collections and museums, including the National Portrait Gallery. That Bachardy also happened to be—with his life partner, acclaimed novelist Christopher Isher wood—half of one of the first openly gay celebrity couples clinches his reputation as a major player in modern queer history. “Don’s portraits reveal the extraordinary even in the most ordinary of faces,” writes Michael Schreiber, who spent hun dreds of hours over eight years taping conversations with Bachardy. These interviews became the basis for his excellent and far-ranging oral history, Don Bachardy: An Artist’s Life . “[Don] has sought to indiscriminately portray the tremendous variety of humanity, drawing and painting people of diverse racial, gender, sexual and generational identities in an effort to demonstrate what binds rather than what separates us as fellow humans.” Schreiber’s book interweaves three “portraits” of Bachardy: lifelong fan of the movies, legendary partner of Isherwood, and renowned portrait artist. We learn that the movies were a huge part of Bachardy’s childhood. Accompanied by his mother and his older brother—the “Three Musketeers”—young Bachardy became “enraptured” by the silver screen and its stars. He crashed Hollywood premieres, kept piles of clippings, and started making portraits of movie personalities from magazine photos. “The movies trained me to look,” he tells Schreiber, “but because I looked at so many movies, I wanted something even more startling than what the movies could give me, and that is life. ” “Life” came knocking early. Bachardy knew he was queer by the time he was eleven and later went to after-hours gay bars with his brother. By the time he met Isherwood on the beach in Santa Monica (he was eighteen, Isherwood 48), Bachardy had already had “a couple of awkward sexual encounters.” Soon Isherwood became “everything” for him—“mentor, influence, partner supreme. ” Isherwood saw to it that Bachardy got an “ed ucation that mattered ... to be a decent human being instead of a sneaky little movie-crazy fan. I was being taught by Chris to take real responsibility for myself as an adult.” Schreiber displays an adroit knack for bringing out Bachardy, who responds with candid, compelling, gossipy, and witty stories. “I don’t ever remember speaking as frankly as I’ve spoken to you about my work and my attitude, or talking so frankly about my famous sitters,” he declares at one point. Philip Gambone is a regular contributor to this magazine. His own in terview with Don Bachardy appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 2011 issue. 34

personality,” he says it’s “humankind” that interests him. “What artist could ask for a more interesting subject than another human being?” Early in his career, Bachardy learned not to place too many conditions on the people who posed for him, “because that’s the way of losing sitters.” He holds himself to the principle that he will “never blame a bad drawing on my sitter.” At the same time, he’s out to “tell the truth about them in life, because that’s what life is.” He tells Schreiber that he’s always after a good picture, if not a flattering likeness. “If it’s a case of doing my best work and maybe hurting the feelings of the sitter, or don’t do my best work and fake it a little bit so that it’s not as stark as it looks, I’ve always chosen the starkness.” Bachardy’s opting for starkness over flattery hasn’t always Isherwood and Bachardy in 1962. George Hoyningen-Huene photo.

TheG & LR