Art Review : Bachardy’s Work Reveals Eroticism and Refinement

No one has gotten the face of L.A.’s upper bohemia down better than Don Bachardy. He’s a Tinseltown native who studied at London’s Slade School of Art in 1961 at the apex of the British Pop Art movement. Back home he spent the next three decades drawing the beautiful damned who live or hover around its art sphere. Now his work is seen in the first half of a two-part survey at the Lizardi-Harp Gallery.

It consists of about 20 large portrait paintings and about half as many drawings. Their most prominent subjects are male odalisques, nude or nearly. Bachardy always works from live models so there is a quality of spontaneous encounter that emphasizes the physical presence of the sitter.

Recent cultural changes notwithstanding, it’s still a bit unusual to encounter the male nude presented as a sex object. Bachardy’s works have a quality of animal vigor rarely present in comparable female imagery. Since his occasional undraped females have it too, it’s safe to assume it comes from his vision as much as the subject.

All the drawings are from the ‘70s. Then the artist concentrated on a spare, linear approach of such extreme elegance that an aura of decadence is virtually built into the work in the same way that smog is built into the L.A. atmosphere. The combination of refinement and eroticism might suggest Bachardy as a kind of forerunner of the sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe, but there is a crucial difference.

Bachardy concentrates so successfully on the revelation of feeling and character that libido or world-weariness are automatically incorporated as normal aspects of humanity. A male sitter identified as Scott Paul Villequette warns any potential admirer that he is as vain as he is handsome. An unidentified lug looks like a big-rig jockey with heart.

Paintings were done in the ‘80s. Their style seems a radical departure. Open brushwork, raw surfaces and a yellow-to-red palette that sometimes glows fluorescent bespeaks rising passion. These works escape a slightly snide courtliness that sometimes adulterated the drawings but their insight is undiminished. They’re like an explosion of what already is in the drawings.

Bachardy presents his longtime companion Christopher Isherwood in broad strokes that show him obdurate, wise and as clear about life as his limpid blue eyes. The artist’s characterization of his colleague artist Peter Alexander is a convincing melange of humor, seduction and madness. History will tell the future what happened in the Angeltown art of this epoch. Bachardy’s art tells how it felt, without flinching and without judgment.

* Lizardi-Harp Gallery, 8678 Melrose Ave., through Aug. 1. Closed Mondays. (310) 358-5680.