The Ranch is pleased to participate in the 2022 Independent Art Fair with a presentation of the underrecognized surrealist painter Renate Druks (1921-2007), which explores the artist’s longstanding interest in the occult, tarot, and astrology. The twelve witching compositions on view depict the female and feline as both mystical and empowered. Outfitted with arcane knowledge and cloaked in dreamlike messages, these figures constellate an otherworldly universe of the artist’s design. This selection highlights Druks' near compulsive portraits of cats—her own personal companions and important symbols in the Tarot as shrewd keepers of secrets. Those secrets in turn confer sentience and wisdom on the animals, posed and primed with more knowledge than their human counterparts. In double portraits of women with their familiars, the cats and seductresses are co-conspirators absorbed in a fantastical reverie as Druks performed her own identity through painting:

Who am I? Primarily a painter, but there are so many other Renatas…I apparently see myself as a saintly figure in a lace cage. Probably a martyr for beauty. No matter what the fantasy or the dream, the inner timekeeper ticks away, measuring so long, so much, so many. A sensuous mood takes over and I enter the realm of instinct shared with animals. I’m tempted to paint myself as a sort of sex queen, a femme fatale, but instead I look for more souls in the mirror. Who is the realest of them all? Manifested paintings pulse through my head as newly conceived ones take seed. Women and beasts, saints and sinners come and go, off and on.

The painted visions of Renate Druks emerge from a remarkable life traversing the cultural underground. Born in Vienna in 1921, she studied painting at the Vienna Art Academy for Women, before fleeing Austria in 1938 on the brink of the Nazi occupation. Druks continued her arts education at the Art Students League in New York City, and in the 1940s, arrived in Los Angeles, where she became embedded in the creative occult cauldron of the mid-century, counting Kenneth Anger, Marjorie Cameron, and Anaïs Nin among her closest friends and collaborators. Like these artists, she blended the centuries-old language of the occult with European surrealism, realizing her visions in prescient paintings and films. Historically, Druks’ œuvre functions as a missing link between the British surrealist Leonora Carrington, who worked mostly in Mexico beginning in the 1940s and was known for her fantastical figures inspired by mythology and folklore and the Argentinian-born surrealist Leonor Fini, who was raised in Italy and created groundbreaking paintings of powerful women. Tying together a diffusive surrealist vision with imagery of seductresses and felines popular in the Hollywood occult, Druks brought her individual painterly style to bear on commissioned portraits for figures within and outside of the Hollywood demimonde.

In her Malibu home, Druks and artist Paul Mathison staged elaborate thematic costume parties, including the infamous “Come as Your Madness’’ celebration that became the inspiration for Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), for which Druks designed all the costumes and make-up. She, Mathison, and her son Peter all feature in the film alongside their friends Cameron, Curtis Harrington, Samson De Brier, and Nin. In her diaries, Nin opined that “Renate’s gift is a heightened mood which communicates itself to others. She creates a state of natural intoxication.” The writer also published a memoir of Druks, Portrait in Three Dimensions (1979), and the artist served as muse for Nin’s novel Collages (1964). Druks completed two short films, Spaceboy (1972), which screened at Cannes in 1973, and A Painter’s Journal (1973). She continued her painting practice—a capsule of her experiences as a critical creative engine in a subterranean film and performance milieu—until her passing in 2007.