Don Bachardy
PICTURES OF CHRISTOPHER
University Gallery, California State University, Fullerton
November 2001

I learned how to write from Christopher Isherwood, the subject of this extraordinary collection of drawings and paintings selected from more than a thousand completed over more than three decades by his life companion, Don Bachardy. I learned from him, as that TV commercial says, the "old-fashioned way": I read him, and emulated him.

When I first discovered the "Christopher" of Isherwood's Berlin Stories as a teenager, still at a British boarding school, I fell in love with that awkward young Englishman, barely fictionalized, wryly observant, and almost furtively sensual beneath the shy, self-conscious exterior. I imagined him to be so much like myself. Later, moving on to Isherwood's collaborations with W. H. Auden, I discovered also the rigorous intellectual, the impeccable craftsman, the clear-sighted poet. Isherwood, I believe, was amongst the outstanding writers of the twentieth century. His name may be less familiar than those of Yeats, or Joyce, or Eliot, but his contribution was in its own way equally important.

If I start out on this personal note, it is because Bachardy's perceptive portraits capture all those qualities as they matured in this exceptional writer. And the work itself is personal. First and foremost, it's a love story, the celebration of a beloved man in the process of his life-including the less glamorous business of growing old and dying. Isherwood and Bachardy first met in 1953, when Isherwood was forty-eight years old, an expatriate living in Los Angeles, one of any number of Europeans seeking an alternative to a civilization that seemed in its final stages of collapse. Bachardy was a bright lad of eighteen, star-struck, longing to make it on the big screen. He had started drawing at the age of three, and as a teenager had spent his time making careful renderings of Hollywood stars from photographs. For him, drawing was already personal: "I felt I knew them," he explains today, "from the movies."

It was Isherwood who first persuaded him, soon after they met, to try his hand at drawing from life-and sat for Bachardy's first effort. The result is included in this exhibition, amazingly refined for an untrained artist, true to life and to the heart. "When Christopher looked at it," Bachardy recalls vividly, "he was shocked. I could tell by his silence. It was a moment before he could appraise it." And Bachardy, who had been desperately seeking his vocation, knew at once that he had found it. With Isherwood's encouragement, he first signed up for a summer class, then immediately dropped his academic plans for a degree at UCLA, and enrolled full-time at Chouinard Art Institute.

Bachardy fondly affirms that he never stopped learning from Isherwood for the rest of his life. He learned particularly to trust his vision as an artist: "Christopher was helpful," he now says, "in calming my fears and doubts about myself. I was always wondering why I was not like my other artist friends"-who were doing anything but portraits. Portraiture, according to the exclusivist and faddish dictates of 1960s mainstream art, was definitely out, along with virtually all other representational work. "Christopher," adds Bachardy, "knew exactly what his talent was and what it was worth. He never played the career game. If he had, he never would have left England."

Painfully shy and introverted as a young man, Bachardy recognizes that it was odd for him to choose this work which would eventually involve him in close confrontation with numerous world-famous people. "At first," he says, recalling the early days, "I would tremble with fear in anticipation. It would take fifteen minutes for my hand to stop shaking." His process is intense: a two-hour sitting for each drawing, no going back, no editing, no starting over. And personal. This is another reason for which it is personal for me, too, to write about: I have sat for him, first clothed and later, at my own request, naked. I wanted to find out what it would feel like to expose myself completely to the intensity of his gaze.

Bachardy links the experience to his old desire to be an actor: in working, he explains, "I am impersonating the sitter, assuming that personality, as though I were making a portrait of myself in costume as my sitter." If he makes faces as he works, "it is an attempt to feel with my face what my sitter feels like." For the sitter, as I can personally attest, the experience is not an easy one. The act of sitting still for two hours is in itself a challenge. More challenging still, though, is the feeling of exposure to the point of vulnerability. The artist's eyes, shifting their focus constantly from sitter to paper, never lose absolute concentration: he is not looking through you, he is looking at you with such focus that no part of you escapes him. It is a kind of benevolent invasion of the territory of your body, and it requires nothing less than total surrender.

The Isherwood portraits are testimony, then, to the lasting intimacy of a deep relationship: they record the inner movements of give-and-take between artist and sitter, the subtleties of emotional states at different phases, the never-ending quest to know, and understand, and have compassion for another human being. They are also unique testimony to the development of an artist's eye, offering us the rare opportunity to study its attention to a single subject over thirty years. It was with Isherwood as his subject that Bachardy would test out his new directions. Inspired by an Emil Nolde exhibition in the early seventies, for example, he decided it was time to try his hand with color-"working very loose," he says, "and still trying to get a likeness"-and made several watercolor heads of Isherwood.

The portraits, in all their diversity of tone and style, cover the full range of Bachardy's work from its origins until the time of Isherwood's death in 1986. In the ink and pencil drawings, often practiced, rarely abandoned for long, his deft lines evoke the contour of the face, and neck, sometimes the hands, and his shading conjures telling details of posture and expression. This is the underlying, authoritative skill that assures him the freedom to experiment with the less conventional approaches that shocked when he first showed them: the startling, washy watercolors, where eyes seem to melt, and veils of transparent color blend astonishing likeness with the mood of a passing moment; the acrylics, whose fast, assured brushwork and aggressive colors can feel like a pitched battle between artist, medium, and subject; and the black acrylic line drawings, whose spontaneous fluidity and simplicity of utterance belies their refined mastery.

What else might have he have learned from Isherwood? Pondering this question, I began to think about what I myself had aspired to emulate in his writing, and two particular qualities sprang to mind. The first was clarity. This was the Isherwood of "I Am a Camera"-words that were borrowed from him for the title of the play upon which the celebrated musical Cabaret was eventually based. In all his writing, I found a clarity of expression that rejected the grand and self-important voice of "literature" in favor of a truly eloquent simplicity. There was no whiff of pretension there. And the second was related to it: a permission to be personal, a trust that I could speak in the first person without any sacrifice in power or reach; a trust that the "I" was also the "eye" on the world that sees things simply-and precisely-as they are.

My sense is that these are things that Bachardy may also have learned from Isherwood; or perhaps they were qualities he already had, and found the permission to trust them, as I did, in what Isherwood taught in the example of his writing and his life. First, clarity: Bachardy's gaze seeks to see his subjects not through the lens of "art"-either history or style-but for who they are, without embellishment or flattery; his work is to make a direct, spontaneous rendering of this reality on paper or canvas. There is nothing difficult to "read" about these pictures. They have a kind of self-evidence that speaks to us almost artlessly. Or rather, their art is hidden, as Isherwood's in his writing, behind the deceptive guise of ease.

And then the "I". Like Isherwood's, Bachardy's is first-person work, and the key to its power is in his unwavering determination to keep faith with the truth he sees-no matter if that truth is uncomfortable, even painful. His eye, while always compassionate, is unsparing. He chooses his sitters, too, on a personal basis. He does not, will not make pictures of people whom he does not like-though he admits at times he can surprise himself, finding something to like through the process of coming to know. And yet despite-or perhaps because of-that intimacy, he manages to speak to us in a universal language. His people, because he allows them to be so very much themselves, are the image of all people. His people are us. We recognize ourselves in them-our strengths and weakness, our brittle vanity and body shame, our vulnerability and the armor with which we seek to protect it.

The portraits of Isherwood are exceptional only in that the relationship is exceptionally close. From them, we can only guess at his youth, since they cover only the latter half of his life. But we see his maturity, the decline of his body, his battle with illness and, finally, with death. Bachardy records it all for us with that camera-curious eye, sparing us nothing. What could be more honest, more touchingly vulnerable, than that 1985 picture of Christopher as a naked old man, reclining back away from us, his body exposed, with nothing left to hide? Or that haunting, unforgettable series of pictures of Christopher after his death, no more now than a useless, empty body, still strangely beautiful but ineffably sad, the abandoned remnant of a human life. In Bachardy's final tribute, we sense our own futile desire to cling despairingly to our beloved, and our own lives.

It is a good moment to be moved, again, by art. This human quality is something we have all too often ignored in the cool academies of modernism, where the new and the hip have been valued at the expense of emotional truth. Bachardy is one artist who staked everything on the enduring quality of being human, exploring his own humanity and that of others, and his portraits of the man whose life was inextricably entwined with his bear witness to that loving dedication.