Henry Darger

Henry Darger (April 12[?], 1892–April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a janitor in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy manuscript called 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, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story. Darger's work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.

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One of Darger's paintings

Life

Darger was born in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated. Cook County records show that he was born at home, at 350 24th Street. When he was four years old, his mother, Rose (née Fullman), died after having given birth to a daughter who was given up for adoption; Henry Darger never knew his sister. Darger's biographer, the art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rose had had two children before Henry, but their whereabouts are unknown.

One of the three known photographs of Henry Darger, taken by David Berglund

By Darger's own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind to him, and they lived together until 1900. In that year the crippled and impoverished Darger Sr. had to be taken to live at St. Augustine's Catholic Mission home, and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr. died in 1905, and his son was institutionalized as feeble-minded in Lincoln, Illinois, apparently on the basis of a doctor's diagnosis that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place."

At another time, the "diagnosis" was masturbation. Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result. He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (akin to Tourette Syndrome), which irritated others. The Lincoln asylum's practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into In the Realms of the Unreal. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, and he had friends as well as enemies. While he was there, he received word that his father had died. A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he hiked back to Chicago, and it was on this journey that he witnessed a huge tornado which devastated the south-central Illinois area. He described it as "a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man's conception" . The 16-year old returned to Chicago and found menial employment in a Catholic hospital, and in this fashion continued to support himself for the following 50 years.

Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army, his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: He attended Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby, although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended. He was largely solitary; his one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind with Darger on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society" that would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s.

In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's North Side. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was discovered.

Darger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death on April 13, 1973, evidently the day after his 81st birthday (at the same Catholic mission—St. Augustine's—where his father had died, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor) and recognized its merit. They took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. He has become internationally recognized thanks to the efforts of the people he knew to save his works.

Darger has become a name in the world of outsider art. At the Outsider Art Fair, held every January in New York City, and at auction, his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum, New York City, opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago plans to re-create his apartment for display.

In the Realms of the Unreal

Darger's work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal postulates a large planet around which Earth orbits as a moon and where most people are Christian (mostly Catholic). The majority of the story concerns the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven sisters who are princesses of the Christian nation of Abbiennia and who assist a daring rebellion against the evil John Manley's regime of child slavery imposed by the Glandelinians. The latter resemble Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War. (Darger, like his father, was a Civil War expert.) Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology also includes a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form. They are usually (but not always) benevolent toward the Vivian Girls.

The fictive war was sparked by Darger's loss of a newspaper photograph of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Chicago girl strangled in 1911 whose murderer was never found. According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. When he located the picture in a public library newspaper archive, he couldn't have it photocopied, and his attempts to trace it proved futile. As a result, Paroubek, under the name of Annie Aronburg, became a character in the story.

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Elsie Paroubek, whose photograph inspired Darger to begin writing In the Realms of the Unreal

In In the Realms of the Unreal, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Annie Aronburg . . . was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government," and was the cause of the war. Through their sufferings, the Vivian Girls are hoped to be able to bring about a triumph of Christianity. Darger provided two endings to the story: In one, the Vivian Girls and Christianity are triumphant; in the other, they are defeated and the godless Glandelinians reign.

Darger's human figures were rendered largely by tracing, collage, or photo enlargement from popular magazines and children's books. (Much of the "trash" he collected was old magazines and newspapers, which he clipped for source material.) Some of his favorite figures were the Coppertone Girl and Little Annie Rooney. He is praised for his natural gift for composition and the brilliant use of color in his watercolors. The images of daring escapes, mighty battles, and painful torture are reminiscent of events in Catholic history; the text makes it clear that the child victims are heroic martyrs like the early saints. One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is an apparent transgenderism: Characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender, some females have penises. Some feel Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy, that he meant it as a symbol of power (a chapter of In the Realms of the Unreal includes an articulate rant on the ability of girls to accomplish as much as boys), or that he modeled the girls after images of the infant Jesus.

Darger's mental state

Much modern fascination with Darger concerns his portrayal of horrific brutality displayed against children. It is sometimes assumed that Darger wrote and drew this way because he was enacting repressed subconscious desires; Darger's posthumous biographer, John M. MacGregor has speculated that Darger may have been the culprit of the 1911 strangling of Elsie Paroubek. (MacGregor later defended his psychoanalytic view of Darger, but denied that he accused him of murder.)

Last years

In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called Sweetie Pie, probably based on Darger's traumatic experience at Countrybrown. He also kept a diary to chronicle the weather and his daily activities. Darger often concerned himself with the plight of abused and neglected children; the institution where he had lived was brought under investigation in a huge scandal shortly after he left, and he might have seen victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked.

The sequel to In the Realms of the Unreal is titled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago. Begun in 1939, it is a Stephen King-like tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or perhaps has an evil consciousness of its own, like the hotel in The Shining. Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. The Vivians and a male friend are sent to investigate and discover that the murders are the work of evil ghosts. The girls go about exorcising each room until the house is clean.

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The cover art of the 2005 Animal Collective album Feels is purportedly an homage to Darger's visual style.

Darger in popular culture

Since his death in 1973 and the discovery of his massive opus, and especially since the 1990s, there have been many references in popular culture to Darger's work—references by other visual artists (including, but not limited to, artists of comics and graphic novels); numerous songs by artists from Snakefinger (one of the earliest, in 1979) to Natalie Merchant (on her 2001 album Motherland); a 1999 book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery; and a 2004 multimedia piece by choreographer Pat Graney incorporating Darger images. These artists have variously drawn from and responded to Darger's artistic style, his themes (especially the Vivian Girls, the young heroines of Darger's massive illustrated novel), and the events in his life. Jessica Yu's 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal details Darger's life and artworks. Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up include a track entitled "Vivian Girls" on the 2006 album Hidden World, the lyrics of which deal with the violent plot and the nature of Danger's fixation on the virginal main characters.

The Vivian Girls were also namechecked by San Francisco guitarist Snakefinger (Philip Lithman Roth), an associate of the Residents, in his song "The Vivian Girls." The song was also recorded by Camper Van Beethoven offshoot Monks of Doom on their 1989 LP "The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company."

Darger's work is also referenced directly in the song title "The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies" on the Sufjan Stevens album The Avalanche. Additionally, the band From Autumn to Ashes references Darger in the song "Placentapede".

The Dead Low Tide song "Purple Crimson And Lavender" also references Darger's work.

Neil Gaiman also references Darger's work in a story contained in a Sandman collection, Endless Nights. In the episode called Going Inside, Delirium is saved from having gone too deep inside her own mind by five mentally challenged people and her guardian dog. One of the characters, an old man, is writing and illustrating a mammoth project that resembles Darger's work very closely in the loneliness of his own house. However, the reference has to be considered inspirational rather than factual, as fictional details, such as the man punishing himself for not having written enough pages per day, are installed into the character's story.

References

• Anderson, Brooke Davis. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: American Folk Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.
• Ashbery, John. Girls on the Run: A Poem. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Bonesteel, Michael (ed.). Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.
• Bourrit, Bernard. Henry Darger: Espace mouvant. In "La Part de l'Oeil" n° 20, Bruxelles, 2005: 252–259.
• Jones, Finn-Olaf, "Landlord's Fantasy," Forbes, April 25, 2005.
• MacGregor, John M. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002.
• Morrison, C. L. The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress: Looking for Henry Darger. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Schjeldahl, Peter. "." The New Yorker, January 14, 2002: 88–89.
  • Peter Schjeldahl's illustrated review of an exhibit of Darger's art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City

External links

• American Folk Art Museum official website
• • Stephen Romano • Private Art Dealer Henry Darger website. This site contains many images of Darger's work and links to other Darger-related sites and has Darger work available for sale.
• Andrew Edlin Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Henry Darger estate.
• Sara Ayers' Henry Darger Page
• Carl Hammer Gallery page, includes a lot of illustrations
• Henry Darger at IMDb
• In the Realms of the Unreal, a 2004 documentary about Henry Darger directed by Jessica Yu. (IMDB page, PBS page)
• Realm of the Unreal, a page devoted to Henry Darger, including artwork, links, a bibliography, and information on current exhibits.
• Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago Summary and analysis of Crazy House by John MacGregor, exemplifying MacGregor's beliefs about Darger's psychology.
• Detailed review of two key Darger books including an analysis of MacGregor's speculations about Darger's psychology. Photo of Darger's workspace.
• In The Realms of the Unreal on Soundclick, an album by Burton Wagner based on Henry Darger's work.