Paris Palais de Tokyo, hosted in june an exhibition of Aleister Crowley’s paintings recently discovered near Cefalu in Italy where he founded his Abbaye of Thelema. Though Crowley the occultist is quite well known, we hardly know about Crowley’s work as a painter or a poet. On the occasion of this exceptional exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo welcomed cult American film director Kenneth Anger to have him introducing the exhibition and present there the film he directed in 2002 about Crowley on the last exhibition of his works in London The Man We Want to Hang. Kenneth Anger was largely nourished by Crowley’s work and no doubt that, even if he was a good friend of Anton Lavey who founded The Church of Satan, films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (directly inspired by Crowley’s rituals), Invocation of my Demon Brother or Lucifer Rising owes more to Crowley’s Thelema than to LaVey’s vision of a Satanism taken metaphorically. No Nitzschean vision of a man with no God nor Master but a strong link with the symbols and fetishes of Crowley’s magical system which grew on middle east and Egyptian antique cultures. The works of and Anger and Crowley as a painter also share a certain number of artistic characteristics : flaming colors, the use of symbols without being symbolic at all and the huge influence they had of popular culture. Kenneth Anger defines himself as a magician and tells we are not supposed to believe him, the vision of his films dissipates all doubts about it.

Click here to see the video of Kenneth Anger at the Palais de Tokyo.