In Don Bachardy’s vivid portraits at the Huntington, show business isn’t what you think

At some point in the mid-1960s, artist Don Bachardy began to make a regular practice of having the sitter for a portrait-drawing sign and date the sheet of paper, just as the artist did, at the end of a rigorous, multihour session. The dual signature routine continued for more than six decades as his career unfolded, until finally Bachardy largely retired his pencil, pen and brush in 2022. The practice is revealing.

On the one hand, it memorializes an origin of Bachardy’s intense commitment to portraiture as an artistic genre. The Los Angeles native, born in the midst of the Great Depression, was a devoted movie fan. Signing pictures of oneself is what an actor does.

On the other hand, the sitter’s handwriting is also proof that the portrait was drawn from life, not copied from a photograph. After World War II, the camera had become portraiture’s primary tool.

Finally, the dual signatures identify a distinctive point of view that makes Bachardy’s portraits so compelling: His drawings are performances. Both artist and sitter participated in putting on a pictorial show. A Bachardy portrait enacts an extended visual encounter between two people, its intimacy inescapable. The “actors” autograph their picture.

Don Bachardy’s 1966 pencil and ink portrait of critic Harold Rosenberg is an early example in the 60-year drawing survey.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

At the entry to “Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits,” the beautiful survey of just over 100 works on paper newly opened at the Huntington in San Marino, a vitrine holds an example of his mother’s Hollywood celebrity scrapbooks. Two rather inert pencil sketches (Montgomery Clift and Bette Davis), made when Bachardy was exiting high school, were copied from photographs in movie magazines, while a couple of excited black-and-white snapshots with movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) were taken by his brother, Ted, during the boys’ public excursions to nab autographs at the Oscars and at Hollywood premieres.

Then, the show quickly shelves the cinematic celebrity angle. That curatorial decision was critical. The exhibition has other, more important things on its mind — specifically, cementing Bachardy’s reputation as a serious artist, rather than a graphically talented movie fan. In that it succeeds.

Bachardy, who will be 91 in May, has drawn countless boldfaced names over the decades, friends and acquaintances generated through his loving 34-year partnership with celebrated writer Christopher Isherwood (“The Berlin Stories,” “A Single Man,” “Christopher and His Kind,” etc.), who died in 1986 at 81. Popular Bachardy books like “Hollywood” and “Stars in My Eyes” are compendiums of many of those movie star drawings, and lots of them are very good. But the glare from all that vivid starlight has gotten in the way of seeing his work for what it is — an evolving artistic project that illuminates acute elements of contemporary portraiture. Now, he’s more than ready for his close-up.

In the chronologically installed exhibition, for every Charles Laughton or Bette Davis, there are 20 drawings of sitters either unknown to a viewer — friends, romantic partners — or else focused on other artistic provinces outside Hollywood’s magnetic field. There are riveting portraits of painters (Billy Al Bengston, Elaine de Kooning, David Hockney, Patrick Hogan), writers (James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, W.H. Auden), musicians and dancers (Lotte Lenya, Igor Stravinsky, Trisha Brown, Alicia Markova), and art-world figures (critic Harold Rosenberg, dealer Nicholas Wilder, bookseller Dagny Corcoran). The result, smartly conceived by guest curator and the artist’s longtime friend Gregory Evans, decisively shifts the frame to Bachardy as living a life among diverse artists.

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The Huntington show downplays Don Bachardy’s famous Hollywood portraits to focus on friends and colleagues.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

While the camera has long since replaced drawing and painting as portraiture’s primary medium, Bachardy’s unmistakable obsessiveness — more than 15,000 of his drawings, a prodigious daily output since 1959, have been gifted to the Huntington — pays off in work that could only be accomplished by a human hand. We tend to think of drawings as preparation for paintings or sculptures, which they had been for centuries. But drawing is the most direct record of evolving artistic thought — a charged current running from brain to hand to sheet. Because of that, drawing flourished as a wholly independent medium in the 1970s, thanks to the concurrent rise of idea-intensive Conceptual art.

By then, Bachardy’s keenly focused portraits were already occupying specific drawing territory in what would become a wide, rich artistic field. He had studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and London’s Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s, but oil painting was never an interest.

Black-and-white drawings dominate the show’s first half, in which closely observed, acutely detailed faces emerge out of the blank void of colorless sheets of paper. Settings rarely turn up, nor do identifying attributes — a musician’s instrument, a scholar’s book, a geographer’s globe. Hands are typically next in line for precision, while bodies are often merely suggested with loose, generalized marks of the pen or brush, leaving room for a viewer’s perception to fill in vacancies. A person seems to be coming into view, materializing from emptiness before your eyes.

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Bachardy draws the eyes first — for practical reasons, he once explained. If the eyes don’t come out right, the portrait fails, so why waste the time and effort on everything else before drawing them?

One subtle but vital through line in the show is the 34-year relationship between Bachardy and Isherwood — with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, arguably the most public queer couple in America before homosexuality was decriminalized nationwide in 2003. Bachardy’s self-portraits and drawings of Isherwood pepper the galleries, a confluence that reveals something that should be obvious: Two portrait artists, one pictorial and the other literary, resided for decades in the same household. Since Bachardy was Isherwood’s junior by 30 years, he no doubt learned a lot; and no doubt the tutelage also went the other way.

In 1985, Don Bachardy drew several hundred portraits of Christopher Isherwood during the celebrated writer’s final weeks of life.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

A pivot comes midway, opening final rooms of colorful acrylic portraits, with four heart-rending drawings of Isherwood’s last weeks of life. The figure is roughly life-size, rendered in spare, firm strokes of black acrylic applied with Japanese brushes to sizable sheets of paper. Hooded eyes, a linear slash for a mouth, a square jaw, a tousle of hair — the startling frugality of lines that bring the dying sitter to full life embodies the knowing depth of the couple’s relationship.

Isherwood, who had been Bachardy’s first live sitter in 1953, knew he was dying of prostate cancer. But he gave himself over to the substantial demands of sitting for what became hundreds of final portraits.

And the process is arduous. I sat for a Bachardy portrait in 1983 — one of two he made that day is in the Huntington exhibition — and the experience was unnerving. Not only is being scrutinized by another person for a few hours discomforting, but there are also worries about remaining stock-still and maintaining agreed-upon silence, necessary to his method, plus apprehension about what’s unfolding unseen on the other side of the easel. The experience remains vivid.

At some point I realized that, as a sitter, I was engaged in “performing” for the artist — prepared hair and wardrobe, lighting angle, precise placement of hands and body for the duration, all left to my choice. Meanwhile, his drawing was performing for anticipated audiences — even if the spectators would only consist of the two of us. The vulnerability was mutual, extending to both artist and sitter.

Don Bachardy, self-portrait, 2018, acrylic on paper,

(Don Bachardy / The Huntington)

There’s a habit of claiming that a portrait means to “capture an essence” or “reveal interiority” concealed within the subject, but I’m skeptical of such assertions. Portraiture is instead all about recording a surface — as fully, robustly and truthfully as possible — which, if successful, will allow for the unencumbered experience of the sheet of marked paper set before a viewer’s eyes. What was going on inside Isherwood as his mortality approached, I cannot say — nor do any of the show’s other 102 drawings offer inner revelations of their varied subjects. But the intensity of Bachardy’s rendering of a man he loved so deeply and who was slipping away is all over those sheets — they’re brilliant performances of a relationship — and they are profoundly moving.

The show was ably organized by Evans, who whittled the initial selection from Bachardy’s prodigious archive, with Dennis Carr, Huntington chief curator of American art, and Karla Nielsen, the library’s senior curator of literary collections. The illustrated catalog, which includes six informative essays, is also excellent.