Henry Darger is one of the most well-known "outsider artists" today. Born in 1892, Darger was not known during his lifetime as anything other than a janitor. It was not until after his death, in 1973, when his 15,145 page manuscript and accompanying watercolor paintings were discovered that he was skyrocketed to underground art world fame.
I was told about Darger by my college mentor, knowing I would take great interest in his work. I quickly set to finding everything I could about him via the internet, and rented the documentary
In the Realms of the Unreal (titled after his manuscript;
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion).
Before I get into Darger, I have to add that this documentary is awful. In short, it made me mad. Not only did it give so minimal information on Darger that they could have credited all their information to Wikipedia, but they made the horrid decision to
animate Darger's illustrations. This made them impossible to examine in their intended manner (the illustrations were constantly zoomed in on with the characters moving around in a slightly alarming way) and was in some ways offensive.
If you would like to learn about Darger or see his work, you're honestly better off researching him on the web, or better yet finding a library that carries one of the few books with large selections of his manuscript and illustrations (there's one at MassArt that I can't wait to get back to Boston and check out).
Darger's manuscript and paintings (what little I've read/seen) are so surreal that it is difficult to wrap my head around, let alone describe. The story follows the lives of the Vivian Girls, seven princess sisters who lead a child rebellion. It is imagined that some of the largest aspects of the story have been taken from Darger's own life and the things that influenced it.
Darger's mother died when he was very young, and following his father's illness and eventual death, Darger was placed in a Catholic boy's home at age eight, and later moved to an institution in Illinois (the reasons for this move are vague), from where he escaped at age 16, to work odd jobs and janitorial work for the remainder of his life.
His story contains many religious themes (the Vivian girls are Christian along with most of the Earth) and the army they are fighting much resembles the Confederate army (both Darger and his father were civil war buffs). There are also scenes of extremely graphic child abuse, which it has been speculated Darger witnessed the effects of as a child (the place where he was institutionalized was under investigation during the latter part of his stay). Darger became compelled to write the manuscript (which he had been working on beforehand, but only in drafts) when he lost a photograph of a murdered child, Elsie Paroubek. Darger had been in the habit of collecting news stories relating to abandoned or abused children (this particular one had gotten a lot of news coverage) which is believed to be because he cared for them very deeply, and related to the children due to his personal experiences. Her murder had not seemed to have a large effect on him, but once he lost the photograph he became consumed with her story and immersed in his story, in which the war begins with the murder of a child laborer.
Darger's illustrations are extremely graphic, sometimes with scenes of the little girls tied to trees or with their innards spilling onto the ground, but something about them grabs hold. Darger was never trained as an artist, in fact many of his illustrations are results of tracing images he found in newspaper clippings (including such well-known figures as the Coppertone girl). This gives his paintings an innocent quality that contrasts the violence in them in an alarming way. Despite his methods of creating the figures, Darger's imagination shows through not only in his creation of this story, but in the paintings as well. He invents "Blengigomeneans", winged and horned creatures that often come in the form of little girls. The image is one difficult to forget. Many of the female characters when shown naked also have penises, the reason for this unknown, though there have been several speculations (ranging from influences of images of christ to Darger's belief that women were superior to men, or even that he simply was unfamiliar with female genitalia).
His sense of composition and color is amazing, each of his illustrations colored with watercolor paint sets. The paintings are otherworldly, in every sense of the term. They serve as a flicker of a view into the mind of a man who lived by night in his own world. There is really no fair way to describe them.
For more:
Edlin Gallery (which represents Darger's estate, a few images + a bio)
and I can't stand to not give a good link with lots of images of his work, but they seem to be scattered. So though I hate to recommend this, if you just go to
google images you really do get a nice taste of his work (in reality there are hundreds of illustrations for this story, but you can find quite a few online). If anyone knows of a good link I will most certainly post it. I, again, recommend picking up one of the books that has been assembled of his paintings and manuscript.
images: various sources, all credit Henry Darger
