Renate Druks

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Renate Druks

Renate Druks (2 January 1921 – 15 December 2007) was an American painter and filmmaker. She worked in

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

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.

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]

References

  1. ISBN 978-1-55152-762-8
    .
  2. ^
    Artnet News
    . Retrieved 31 July 2023.
  3. ^ a b c "Renate Druks". maxlevai.com. Retrieved 31 July 2023.
  4. ^ a b c d e Haigney, Sophie (29 July 2021). "At The Ranch in Montauk, Plenty of Room for Art and Horses". The New York Times.
  5. ISBN 978-0-684-80649-5
    .
  6. ^ Olenick, Mike (November 13, 2010). "The Inauguration of Renate Druks". Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980.
  7. ^ "Finding Aid for the Renate Druks Collection of Material by and Relating to Anaïs Nin, 1953-1977". Online Archive of California. Retrieved 31 July 2023.
  8. ^ Champlin, Charles (14 May 1973). "'Godspell' kicks off Cannes festival". The Los Angeles Times. p. 41. Retrieved 23 April 2023 – via newspapers.com.
  9. ^ "Other Cinema: Archive Fever". Artists' Television Access. 8 December 2019. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
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