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American painter and filmmaker From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Renate Druks (2 January 1921 – 15 December 2007) was an American painter and filmmaker. She worked in Los Angeles, where she also practiced Thelema, the occult religious movement established by Aleister Crowley.[1] She acted as a muse to other artists including Anaïs Nin, Marjorie Cameron and Kenneth Anger.[2]
Druks was born in Vienna on 2 January 1921 into a Jewish family and went on to study at the Vienna Art Academy for Women.[2] In 1938, she and her American husband fled Austria for the United States with their son, Peter.[2][3][4] She studied further at the Art Students League, spent several years in Mexico, and eventually settled in Los Angeles.[2][3] She threw lavish parties at her Malibu home, one of which becamse the inspiration for Anger's 1954 film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.[4]
Druks painted in a surrealist style and was inspired by paganism, tarot, and the occult.[2][4] Her subjects were typically women and cats, and her style has been compared to Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini.[4] Her painting found little commercial success during her lifetime, but in July 2021, fourteen years after her death and more than fifty years since her last solo exhibit, a collection of her paintings was exhibited at Max Levai's Ranch gallery in Montauk, New York.[4]
She was a close friend of Anaïs Nin and, in 1979, illustrated and published Nin's memoir of their friendship, Portrait in Three Dimensions.[5] Nin's 1964 novel, Collages, was also inspired by Druks and the two collaborated on a screenplay adapted from the work.[3][6]
Druks was also a filmmaker. In 1967 she made a 12 minute documentary about her painting process, titled A Painters Journal.[7] In 1973 her short film Space Boy was nominated for a Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.[8] Space Boy was intended as a sequel to her friend Curtis Harrington's 1966 science-fiction horror film, Queen of Blood.[9]
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