Past Lecturers
Robert Flynn Johnson delivered the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture at the Huntington Library on April 20, 2022: “Skill, Speed, and Diplomacy: The Artistic Achievement of Don Bachardy.”
Johnson (b. 1950) is curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He has published several books and exhibition catalogues, including Artists’ Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000, Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers, and The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs.
Portrait of Robert Flynn Johnson by Don Bachardy, August 23, 1999
Robert Chattel, Nels Youngborg and Alvin-Christian Nuval, historic preservation consultants at Chattel, Inc., delivered the 2021 Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture via Zoom on April 21. Their lecture, “Object of My Nostalgia: Designating the Isherwood-Bachardy Residence and Studio in Los Angeles”, described how they obtained Historic-Cultural Monument status for the Isherwood-Bachardy house and studio in Santa Monica, including their research in the Christopher Isherwood archive at The Huntington Library. Isherwood and Bachardy moved into the house in 1959, and Bachardy still lives and works there; it was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument in 2020. The lecture included a pictorial tour of the residence and studio. A recording can be watched here.
Robert Chattel
Nels Youngborg
Alvin-Christian Nuval
Edward Mendelson was due to deliver the Huntington Centennial Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture at the Huntington Library on April 22, 2020. Mendelson (b. 1946) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is W.H. Auden’s literary executor, and has edited Auden’s Collected Poems, Selected Poems, As I Walked Out One Evening, and the first six volumes of a complete edition of Auden’s writing. He has also written two critical biographies of Auden, Early Auden and Later Auden, as well as The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
Edward Mendelson (Photo: Shannon Taggart)
The 2018 Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture took the form of a conversation between Tom Ford and Katherine Bucknell. Ford (b. 1961) was creative director of Gucci for a decade, before establishing his eponymous fashion and beauty brand in 2005. He directed and co-wrote a film adaptation of Isherwood’s A Single Man, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, which premiered in 2009. His second film, Nocturnal Animals, featured Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival, among a number of other prizes. A recording of the conversation, in which Ford discusses his adaptation of A Single Man, can be heard here.
The second Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture was delivered by Matthew Spender in September 2017. Matthew Spender (b. 1945) is the son of Isherwood’s lifelong friend Stephen Spender, the English poet and critic. He is a sculptor and the author of A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents, a breathtakingly observant and revealing memoir about his mother and father and the artistic circle in which he grew up. He is also the author of Within Tuscany; From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky; and Goats on the Roof. A recording of his lecture, which focused on the relationship between Isherwood, Spender and Auden in the 1920s and ‘30s, can be heard here.
Matthew Spender as a boy, with his father and mother, Stephen and Natasha Spender, and his sister, Lizzie.
American writer and critic Edmund White (b. 1940) delivered the inaugural lecture on September 29, 2016, “Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man.” White discussed the lasting impression Isherwood’s groundbreaking novel had on him as a young author assembling his gay identity in the pre-Stonewall era. A recording of White’s lecture can be heard here.
White has published some twenty-five books ranging from fiction, biography, and memoir to literary and cultural criticism. His novels include the autobiographical trilogy comprised of A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; The Married Man, about the intimate psychological repercussions of AIDS; and, more recently, Jack Holmes and His Friend, Hotel de Dream, and Chaos. He reveals his personal affinity with French culture in The Flaneur and Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. In City Boy, he remembers New York in the 1970s. His biography of French writer Jean Genet won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among many honors and prizes, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2016, he was named the official Author for the State of New York.
As a prequel to the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture series, Armistead Maupin delivered his lecture “My Logical Grandfather” in November 2015.