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Bachardy is probably best known for his nudes, which are at once erotic and dispassionately observed, and for his celebrity portraits. While his drawings and paintings of non-celebrities far outnumber the likenesses he has rendered of famous people, he has completed sittings with such well-known and diverse subjects as Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, James Merrill, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Aldous Huxley, among many others. (He has also been the subject of works by artists such as David Hockney, whose masterful double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy is justly famous.)
In the late 1980s, Bruce Voeller of the Mariposa Education and Research Foundation commissioned Bachardy to create a series of portraits of a dozen gay rights leaders. The series includes studies of Elaine Noble, Frank Kameny, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Morris Kight, Charles Bryden, James Foster, Bruce Voeller, David B. Goodstein, Jean O’Leary, Reverend Troy Perry, and Barbara Gittings. In 1995, after the death of Voeller and the closure of the Mariposa foundation, the series was donated to the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library.
Among Bachardy's best known works are the frequently reproduced drawings and paintings of Isherwood that span some thirty years and capture the novelist in an amazing variety of moods; the famous likeness of W. H. Auden--his forehead a mass of wrinkles--that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London; the haunting image of a haggard, aged Bette Davis, her downturned mouth held as though set in stone; and the intense and controversial painting of former California Governor Jerry Brown that hangs in the California State House.
Bachardy's portraits are not flattering--in fact, they occasionally seem cruel in their honesty--but in sure lines and deft strokes they convey with authenticity and accuracy the personalities of his sitters. Indeed, they are psychological portraits as much as they are physical likenesses. Almost Oriental in their economy of line, Bachardy's drawings distill the essences of his subjects, even as they also constitute a record of his own experience.
