Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh

I could live out a fantasy, if only on paper. “I could live out a fantasy, if only on paper,” Renee told Freund of illustrating this fierce female spy, who was fighting the artist’s own persecutors on the page. Her colleague Nick Cardy conceived Rio, but Renee shaped her look: an athletic brunette who scrapped with Nazis and their allies in Latin America. She started out decorating wooden boxes for a shop, then drew publicity materials for Woolworth’s department store.

A decade later in New York, she used these drafting skills to support herself and her parents, who had surrendered their assets to Nazi authorities in Austria and were living in a small Upper West Side apartment. Renee, they said, still remembers drawing under her family’s dining table as a child in Vienna, sketching ballerinas and costumed performers she had seen at the theater.

Renee’s pen and ink sketches have traveled to the birthplace she fled at age 17 and have returned to her adoptive home of over 80 years, where she still lives and will celebrate her 100th birthday in May.Īlthough she was unable to speak to a reporter, her daughter and colleagues spoke about her improbable life. The exhibit originally appeared at the Jewish Museum Vienna in 2019. “Three with a Pen” highlights three Jewish cartoon artists who grew up in Vienna and escaped to safety after 1938: Renee, Paul Peter Porges and Bil Spira. Those drawings will be on view in an exhibition running March 11-September 3 at New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum. She escaped to England on a Kindertransport and reunited with her parents in New York in 1940. Outside work she was a Vienna-born Holocaust survivor who fled Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the New York offices of Fiction House, the comic book publishing firm where Renee worked, she was a scrappy immigrant who worked her way up from erasing pencil marks to drafting her own heroines. Renee.” Fans knew neither Renee’s gender nor her incredible origin story, which rivaled the plotline of Señorita Rio. “Everybody assumed I was a man,” artist Lily Renee Phillips has said of the fan mail she received at the time, which was always addressed to “Mr.

The artist who drew Rio’s action-packed panels in the 1940s, and signed as L. Jack Kirby, the pen name of Jacob Kurtzenberg, concocted Captain America.Īlthough lesser-known, the comic book heroine Señorita Rio was Hollywood starlet Rita Farrar by day and Nazi-fighting secret agent by night. Bob Kane, born Robert Kahn, created Batman. Superman creators Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel used the pseudonyms Joe Carter and Jerry Ess. JTA - Like the comic superheroes they invented, the Jewish creators of the characters often had secret identities – at least different names.

Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh