Henry Darger Overview

One can't view the art of Henry Darger without imagining a fantastic psychological profile. Some 15,145 legal-sized pages make up his 15-volume ars poetica, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Known in art circles as "The Realms of the Unreal," the work -- essentially an illuminated manuscript created in a metaphorical monk's cell -- indeed seems to have arrived from such a realm. The novel depicts a world at war, in which the godless Glandelinians battle the Christian Angelinneans for the bodies and souls of a world of little girls. The Glandelinians subject millions of the girl-slaves to crucifixion, strangling, evisceration, and dismemberment, violence that often fills pages of detailed description. The protectors of the children are the Blengins -- winged serpents with piercing tongues that inject the girls with an immortality serum. The novel's magnificent illustrations show a nation of girls lifted straight from 1920s-era advertisements and children's books, except for two things: they always appear naked and always with penises. Holy sexual signifier! One immediately wants to know the mind behind such a work, and Darger's life doesn't disappoint: he was abandoned, confused, fanatically religious, obsessive, and a loner. He was almost four years old when his mother died in childbirth (the young sister is believed to have been put up for adoption). Darger lived with his father until the age of eight, when he was placed in a Catholic home. While he excelled academically, he exhibited a few minor behavioral problems, such as making strange noises (interestingly, the Vivian girls escape their captors by making noises to scare them). Around 1902, he was placed in a nightmarish asylum that housed disabled children ranging from the severely disturbed to the eccentric Darger, who was confined as a result of his diagnosis of "masturbation." Darger escaped at age 17 and returned to his native Chicago, where he landed a menial job and a room. A year later he began work on his epic illustrated novel, using the only tools he had: his intense visual imagination, his newly channeled intellect, and cheap art supplies. He papered his walls with 12-foot sheets of newsprint, creating 63 scroll-like paintings that pushed children's watercolors to amazing heights of expressive color-saturation. His additional 300 drawings prefigured the appropriationist techniques of Pop art. He rendered the landscapes of the war-torn realm in eerie pastels: painfully sunny yellows, institutional greens, and fairytale-turned-nightmare blues. He populated this land with existing images from newspapers and magazines, which he altered by clipping or tracing, then placed within his own text. The obsessive technique matches the passionately written narrative in a perfect synthesis of form and content. As one perceptive critic noted, "One way to address the power of Darger's work is by imagining the intensity of a child's feelings exponentially expanded to full (adult) size. But the viewer is also inevitably aware of the possibility that these same disturbing gestures might mark the obsessive qualities of a serial killer... of a pedophile." Remember, however, that Darger never intended for his work to be seen -- he was his own audience, so why not give his fantasy free reign? In fact, this devotion to his vision makes him seem less neurotic than the critics who stand aghast at the content of the book. It is his mercurial personality, not the possibility of his derangement, that makes Darger so fascinating. Forget the violence, the thinly veiled sexual content, and even our fantasies of mental disturbance -- in the end, Darger's opus is more a battleground for his identity than a pictorial guide to his neuroses. This man who was imprisoned in institutions and abandoned by his family seemed to have lost all hope of ever being socially accepted. Living in this self-perceived vacuum, he constructed his identity solely in relation to his art and his god (he sometimes attended up to five masses a day). Darger's life-giving relationship to his art makes his recent elevation to "Outsider-artist-extraordinaire" status seem inaccurate and, frankly, beside the point. He wasn't outside anything -- in fact, he was the center of his own art world, the ultimate insider. The art world that now covets the work of the newly chic "weirdo" exists galaxies away from Darger's personal realm of the real.