ART REVIEW : Don Bachardy: Drawings From a Deathwatch

How do you watch a loved one die? Artist Don Bachardy regarded Christopher Isherwood’s passing with ruthless compassion and, as he observed, he drew. Now a selection of the images are on view at the James Corcoran Gallery. It takes courage to face these images but no one who looks will come away unrewarded. They are perhaps the most truly intimate drawings ever achieved.

Bachardy was 18 when he met Isherwood. The author of “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and “The Berlin Stories” was 48. They lived together for more than 30 years as lovers, father and son, student and teacher. When Isherwood’s prostate cancer was diagnosed in 1981, Bachardy remembered his friend’s oft-repeated fear. He was not afraid to die, perhaps because of his belief in Vedanta. But he dreaded to die in the clinical surroundings of a hospital, a prospect frightful enough to make anyone worse.

Bachardy determined to keep him in their longtime digs in Santa Monica Canyon. Here David Hockney had painted their double portrait. They face the viewer seated in separate chairs, Bachardy looks affably at us, Isherwood looks sharply at him, ferociously protective. Now it would be Bachardy’s turn.

Here Isherwood’s old English school chums W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender came to visit. So did certain L.A. artists--Robert Graham, Peter and Clytie Alexander and Billy Al Bengston, among others. There was something mutually invigorating about the connection. It seemed to fuel Isherwood’s apparently endless capacity for rejuvenation. He gave the artists a living link to the larger classic modernist tradition.

This was the house where Isherwood wrote journals, screenplays, essays and novels including, “A Single Man” which many consider his best book. This was the house where Bachardy did portraits out in the studio that Isherwood never visited without asking permission.

So there they stayed, illness notwithstanding, Bachardy drawing with brush and black acrylic, the ailing Isherwood posing with great patience and ever-increasing difficulty until the artist was forced to work from whatever awkward posture pain allowed his friend to take. Bachardy did as many as 10 drawings a day and wound up with more than 100 sheets.

The exhibition is presented in connection with the publication of a book called “Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood by Don Bachardy” (Farber & Farber Ltd.). It contains essays by the artist, critic John Russell and an interview by Stephen Spender. Bachardy’s own journal offers changing motives for the project.

“I feel guilty,” he wrote, “But this is the only way I can be with him intensely. Perhaps it is my revenge on him for getting old and sick.”

Later Bachardy mused: “I know I could not have got through (the last months) without breaking down if it had not been for my decision to do these drawings.”

Looking at them one is reminded of Isherwood’s own literary aesthetic. Among the greatest English prose stylists ever to live hereabouts, he was an acute observer who wrote from direct experience. He was surely speaking of himself when he gave the young fictionalized author in “Berlin Stories” the famous line, “I am a camera.”

In doing these drawings Bachardy became a camera that looked first at reality, then through it. He saw Isherwood naked and sagging--looking like a British Buddha, then sprouting breasts from his hormone shots. He observed the patient’s wristwatch and bathrobe grow larger as he grew smaller and the loosening of his dental plate. On Jan. 4, 1986, Isherwood died at age 81. Bachardy continued work, drawing the corpse.

Over his years as a portraitist Bachardy developed two virtually separate manners of work. His drawings were rendered in classic updated English portrait style with a probing French line recalling Ingres. They were elegant and astonishingly true to the sitter. Later painted portraits were brushy and expressionistic, bringing to mind both the intensity of Lucian Freud and the neurotic delicacy of Egon Schiele.

The Isherwood drawings fuse the two styles, blending surgical accuracy with emotive empathy. The style of them seems to invent itself to suit the moment. Some are as sympathetically elegant as Gainsborough, others as forthright as Kokoschka. Others resemble nothing so much as the ink drawings of eccentric Zen monks who took decades to develop the capacity to render a subject’s inner spirit. In these there is a quality of absurdist stoicism in Isherwood that lends the works the profundity of humor. They look all the more Oriental because the Isherwood signature on the vertical edge looks like Japanese calligraphy. He looks out as if quipping, “Dying is easy; art is hard.”

Styles have fused before. Rarely, if ever have artist and subject blended so completely. Here, identification is so close that the drawings seem to virtually disappear, leaving a quality of pure empathy hovering above the surface of the paper. Isherwood winces and we feel it. When hopelessness rallies to defiant vitality, we experience the surge of energy. When his pain becomes unbearable, so does our own. When vanity demands he strike the pose of a great author in his wrinkled robe, conceit is suddenly ennobled. He stares at Bachardy with a bright, penetrating gaze that wells over with love and begs for release.

* James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St. , Santa Monica; to Oct. 19. Closed Mondays (213) 451-4666.