The Santa Monica College Barrett Art Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of portraits by Los Angeles artist, Don Bachardy. The exhibition, DON BACHARDY, The Women: Fifty Years of Portraits, showcases a broad selection of women's portraits from 1962 to 2017. The exhibition is a tribute to Don's history as a portrait artist and his ability to capture, first with pencil or ink, then acrylic and color, the essential core of his sitter.

Don has made thousands of portraits from life, never from Photographs, working out of his studio in Santa Monica Canyon, where he lives and works today. Don insists that the work is always about a collaboration between the artist and sitter, and creating a likeness from life. Each portrait, drawn and painted from life, is completed in a single sitting. As recognition of this collaboration between sitter and artist each of his sitters sign and date their finished portraits. Recognized for his extraordinarily deft, fluid and powerful portraits, Bachardy has rendered such figures as Aldous Huxley, Anais Nin and Dorothy Parker, as well as the official portrait of Governor Jerry Brown, which hangs in the California State Capitol. A native of Los Angeles, Don Bachardy met his lifetime partner, author Christopher Isherwood, in 1953 with whom he remained until Isherwood's death in 1986.

Don Bachardy is known as a portrait artist. He 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 one-man exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. Most recently, he had a one-man exhibition at Cheim & Read, New York in 2013, at Craig Krull Gallery, Los Angeles in 2011 and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in 2004-2005. His works 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 Institute, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. Seven books of his portraits have been published: three by Twelvetrees Press (October (in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood), 1980, One Hundred Drawings, 1983 and Drawings of the 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 with portraits by Don Bachardy, published by Capra Press, 1993; and Stars in My Eyes, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in November 2000.