Renate Druks's exhibition, State of Mind: Paintings 1959–1979.

The Austrian-American painter Renate Druks (1921–2007) had an enigmatic presence within the fabled Los Angeles postwar counterculture. As “Renate,” she appears as an enchanting protagonist in the novels and acclaimed diaries of her close friend, the French writer Anaïs Nin. She also performed as the sensual and powerful Lilith in Kenneth Anger’s seminal 1954 occult film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Even the spelling of her name is, at times, in flux, appearing variously throughout archives as “Reneé,” “Renate,” and “Renatta.” Yet Renate the painter has, until recently, evaded wider recognition.

The paintings featured in this exhibition, spanning the mid-1960s to the 1990s, are a vital contribution to the still-unfolding histories of occult and proto-feminist art in North America. Mesmerizing and strange to behold, they evoke surrealism’s dreamlike atmospheres and the metaphysical spirit of symbolism. In her vividly-colored works, women pose with their animal familiars in imaginary landscapes; objects are arranged into talismanic tableaux; and cats gaze coyly back at the beholder, as if aware of their secrets. Postwar Los Angeles was a hub for alternative spiritualities and nonnormative lifestyles, and a haven for Beat writers, countercultural artists, and displaced European Surrealists. Their aims were oriented toward spiritual and psychic liberation; the artists and writers were equally versed in Jungian theories and the emergent psychedelic culture espoused by British writers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard in their frequent lecture circuits around the city. In her works, Druks drew inspiration from a wide range of esoteric sources popular within her coterie, from British occultist Aleister Crowley’s gnostic religion Thelema, and the Hindu philosophical practice, Vedanta, to classic themes within the surrealist lexicon: astrology, dreams, and psychoanalysis.

By the 1960s, portraiture became the primary vehicle through which Druks transmitted her visions and hidden messages. In an unconventional self-portrait, with the parenthetical title, State of Mind (1967), the delicately painted face, hand, and foot of a disassembled doll—her effigy, as she describes it—are strewn across lush grass. In defiance of realism, a cloudy, moonlit sky is repeated as a series of pictures-withinpictures, situating the scene in a distinctly dreamlike realm.

Druks’s proximity to Hollywood led to several portrait commissions that, too, broke from conventions. Her portraits of actors, including Doris Dowling and Ellis Raab, explore the multiple identities inherent to their profession, depicting each in fantastical landscapes alongside “an entourage of their roles.” In Dowling’s portrait, The Actress (1962), she wears a long red shroud. Three faceless women donning elaborate gowns pose on a miniature stage embedded in her chest.

Druks’s 1962 painting, Raven, features a double portrait of her friend Raven Harwood, a mystic dancer. Her animal familiar perches at her feet, representing her “stronger, darker, and more independent self.” Standing nude, with her back toward the viewer, she suggestively holds a shimmering lace shawl at her side, gazing at her reflection in the distance. The painting is charged with erotic power, as if to challenge Surrealism’s traditionally masculinist depictions of women as muses. Rather, Druks represents eroticism as the core of women’s strengths and identity.

Druks was highly attuned to the fluctuations and fragmented experiences of modern life, especially the multiple roles women perform within it. Her paintings frequently depict her subjects in the threshold of a place–in doorframes, windows, hallways, and mirrors–suggesting that they, too, are forever on the verge of transformation, of endless searching for who they might become. As Druks astutely, and perhaps humbly, proclaimed about her work, “Some day I hope to understand what I meant. Sometimes it takes me years to get my own message.”

About the artist

Renate Druks was born in 1921 in Vienna and enrolled at the Viennese Women’s Academy at the age of fourteen. In 1938, she married the American medical student Harry P. Loomer, and, on the brink of World War II, emigrated with him to his family home in Brooklyn. Druks continued her education at the Art Students League of New York before Loomer joined the Army Medical Corps, which led to their wartime relocation to Chicopee, Massachusetts; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Tampa, Florida. In the late 1940s, Druks retreated to an artist colony in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she likely first met the infamous Los Angeles mystic artist Marjorie Cameron.

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1950, and newly divorced, Druks became part of a coterie that shared a passion for the occult, mythology, and Hollywood glamor, and included Anais Nin, Marjorie Cameron, furniture designer and illustrator Paul Mathison, eccentric aesthete Samson De Brier, and the filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington. At her home in Malibu, Druks hosted elaborate masquerade parties; her most infamous party, themed “Come As Your Madness,” directly inspired Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

Between 1957–65, Druks exhibited her paintings exclusively at the Lane Galleries in Westwood.In the ensuing decades, she primarily made a living through commissioned portraits and illustrations for journals and album covers, including the 1976 release of the soundtrack for the film Forbidden Planet (1956), composed by avant-garde husband and wife duo Louis and Bebe Barron. Although she rarely exhibited in her later life, she continued to paint until her death in 2007. Her work has been exhibited posthumously at The Ranch, Montauk; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; the Independent Art Fair, New York; and The USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles.