Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy was born in Los Angeles in 1934. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. His first one-man exhibition was held in October 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London. He has since had many one-man exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. Additionally, in 2004, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California presented a survey of his work.

Bachardy’s portraits reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M.H. de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the California State Capitol Building (official portrait of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr), the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Eight books of his work have been published: three by Twelvetrees Press (October, in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, 1980, One Hundred Drawings, 1983 and Drawings of Male Nude, 1985); a collection of seventy drawings of artists, 70 X 1, published by Illuminati, 1983; Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood, published by Faber and Faber, 1990 (Great Britain), 1991 (U.S.A.); Short Cuts the Screenplay portraits by Don Bachardy, published by Capra Press, 1993; Stars in My Eyes, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. The eighth book, Hollywood was published by Glitterati Incorporated in 2015.

Don Bachardy is represented by Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California. In 2008, the gallery presented an exhibition of abstract paintings and recent acrylic portraits. Then, in 2010, the gallery presented a 50 year survey of Bachardy’s self-portraiture.

In September of 2011, in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, the gallery opened an exhibition of Bachardy‘s portraits made over the last 40 years of iconic artists from Southern California, including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha.

Bachardy's exhibition, Literary Figures, opened at Craig Krull Gallery in September of 2013. The exhibition featured 18 portraits of authors such as Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles, and Annie Proulx. Each of these portraits was signed by the subject, and in fact, the Allen Ginsberg portrait includes a hand-written poem that Ginsberg composed while looking out the window at the Pacific Ocean during the sitting.

In January of 2015, Craig Krull Gallery presented a major retrospective of Bachardy’s portraits of actors, actresses, producers, directors and screenwriters such as Natalie Wood, Jack Nicholson, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Montgomery Clift and Marion Cotillard, in conjunction with the release of Hollywood by Glitterati Incorporated.

In September of 2016, the gallery will present an exhibition, A Single Man, which will consist of eight of Don Bachardy’s portraits of Peter Alexander, from the 60s to the present day.