Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

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Don Bachardy, 1934-
Art Collection, 1962-74, n.d.

2 flat file drawers (11 items)

Acquisition: Purchases (R6488, R6853) 1975, and Gift (G11450), 1997
Access: A minimum of twenty-four hours is required to pull art materials to the Reading Room.
Processed by: Helen Young, 2003

Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch
Scope and Contents
Provenance
Item List

Biographical Sketch

The portraitist and painter Don Bachardy was born May 18, 1934, in Hollywood, California, to Jess and Glade Bachardy. Jess Bachardy was an airplane tool planner at Lockheed Corporation, and Don grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. In early childhood he started drawing, and his subjects were always people. As a pre-adolescent, he developed an interest in the movies to which his mother took he and his older brother Ted, often to the disapproval of their father. Bachardy considers his early love of movies a major influence, as he became interested in looking at people from gazing at close-ups of movie actors on the large screens. From an early age he drew from photographs of actors.

After high school Bachardy enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, but found that he hated it. He left UCLA and enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and later studied for one year at the Slade Art School in London. In 1961 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London.

During his freshman year at UCLA Bachardy was introduced to Christopher Isherwood. In 1953 Bachardy moved into Isherwood's ocean-view home in Santa Monica, where they lived together as lovers until Isherwood's death in 1986.

During his career as a portrait artist, Bachardy has done portraits of many well-known figures and celebrities, including many of the movie stars he watched as a youth. He has also drawn many of the members of the literary circle of Isherwood and W. H. Auden. In 1984 Bachardy received much publicity (and touched off a controversy) when he used an expressionist style with bold colors for the official portrait of Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Jr. to be hung in the California State Capitol Building.

In 1968 Bachardy co-wrote with Isherwood the Broadway play, A Meeting by the River. Bachardy has also published collections of his portraits, including Stars in My Eyes (1999) in which he describes his methods and tells of his experiences of the thirty-three celebrities included.

Sources:

Markel, M. "Portrait Will Have California Touch." Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1983.

White, James. "On Don Bachardy." http://www.americanartists.org/art/article_on_don_bachardy.htm (accessed Oct. 14, 2003).

Additional biographical material on Don Bachardy is found in magazine and newspaper clippings in the Art Collection's vertical file.

Scope and Contents

The Don Bachardy Art Collection comprises eleven original portrait drawings by Don Bachardy. Most are of well-known figures and acquaintances, as rendered in ink, conté crayon, pastel, or charcoal. The works are listed alphabetically by portrait subject in the following Item List. Titles are transcribed from the items, and cataloger's titles appear in brackets.

Provenance

The portraits of Yannis Boras, E. M. Forster, Chester Kallman, Elizabeth Mayer, and Igor Stravinsky are from the collection of Chester Kallman and W. H. Auden.

Item List

Series I. Title, date(s)

Accession No.Title/DescriptionDate MediumDimensionsLocation
69.26W. H. Auden [half-length portrait, seated, holding cigarette]. 1962ink73.6 x 58.2 cm.LTL
75.157.1[Yannis Boras, head-and-shoulders portrait, profile, facing wine bottle and glass]. 1966contécrayon29.6 x 21 cm.FF 1-5
75.157.8[E. M. Forster, three-quarter length portrait, seated].n.d. conté crayon and ink wash76.3 x 55.7 cm., in mat 101.7 x 81.1 cm.FF 1-1
75.28Lillian Hellman [half-length portrait].1974 conté crayon and pastel94.1 x 58.8 cm., in mat 101.7 x 81.1 cm.FF 1-1
97.11Christopher Isherwood [three-quarter length portrait, three-quarters view]. 1969ink wash44.6 x 31 cm., in mat 58.5 x 49.4 cm.FF 1-1
75.157.7[Chester Kallman, half-length portrait, three-quarters view, seated]. n.d.ink73.5 x 58.6 cm.FF 1-1
75.157.6Elizabeth Mayer [half-length portrait, seated].1962 ink71.2 x 55.4 cm., in mat 101.7 x 81.1 cm.FF 1-1
73.547Anaïs Nin [three-quarter length portrait, seated].1965 conté crayon and ink wash77 x 56.4 cm.FF 1-1
91.6 [Mary Jennifer Selznick, daughter of David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, half-length portrait, seated]. n.d.charcoal and gouache74.1 x 58.5 cm., in mat 86.5 x 71.1 cm.FF 1-1
75.157.7[Igor Stravinsky, reclining, reading book, next to melon]. n.d.conté crayon44.5 x 64.3 cm., in mat 71 x 92 cm.FF 1-1
69.27Tennessee Williams [half-length portrait, seated, holding glass]. 1962ink73.6 x 55.3 cm., in mat 101.5 x 81.1 cm.FF 1-1
Don Bachardy Art Collection Finding Aid
(Last modified: 7 April 2008)

Reference queries to: art@hrc.utexas.edu

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