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Henry DargerHenry Darger (1892-1973) was a recluse who spent his life working as a janitor in the Chicago area. Shortly before his death, when he had to be placed in a mission home, his landlord, designer Nathan Lerner, discovered that Darger had left a 15,000-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 a collection of several thousand watercolour paintings and other drawings illustrating the story. Darger's work has subsequently become accepted as one of the most remarkable examples of outsider art.
Early LifeDarger's mother died when he was four after giving birth to a daughter. The daughter was given up for adoption, and Darger never saw her. According to Darger scholar John MacGregor, he would later abstain from any intercourse with females for fear of an accidental liaison with his sister. [1] His father was unable to care for him and placed him in an orphanage at the age of eight, dying soon afterwards. Darger was quickly diagnosed as mentally ill, with his disease being listed as "masturbation," and was sent to the Illinois Home For Feeble Minded Children until he ran away at sixteen. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Darger, then twenty-five years old, was drafted and sent to a basic training camp. He was honorably discharged in December of that same year for physical and psychological reasons, a rejection that he never fully recovered from. He was furious about not being included in the war effort, and it was after this rejection that "the need for a war of his own, a private war fully under his command, became compulsively and massively necessary" (MacGregor, p. 199). His rejection from the military became one of Henry's personal reasons for tackling In The Realms of the Unreal. In The Realms of the UnrealDarger was a janitor at a Catholic hospital and a devout Roman Catholic who went to mass daily; his work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal describes the tribulations of the "Vivian Girls", seven sisters who are princesses of the Christian nation of Abbiennia, daring rebels against a regime of child slavery imposed by the "Glandelinians"; the latter resemble confederate soldiers from the American Civil War. The elaborate mythology of the story also includes a species called the "Blengens", winged beings with curved horns, who are usually (but not always) benevolent towards the Vivian Girls. The rage at the heart of the war was sparked by Darger's loss of a newspaper photograph of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Chicago girl who was strangled in 1911. Elsie's murderer was never found, and although there is no evidence to support such a claim, MacGregor has speculated that Darger himself may have been the murderer. [2] Darger told God that if God did not give the photograph back, the evil Glandelinian army would regain power. The photograph was never returned. As a result, Paroubek, under the name of "Anna Aronburg," became a character in the story. In The Realms, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Anna Aronburg... was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government," and it is the cause of the war. As Darger wrote, "It was predicted that the solving of the Aronburg mystery, or for the revenge of her assassins, was the only hope of the christian nations winning the war." (MacGregor, p. 195) Through their sufferings, the Vivian Girls are supposed 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. Artistic TechniquesDarger's human figures were rendered largely by techniques based on tracing, collage, or photo-enlargement from popular magazines and children's books. Some of his favorite figures were the Coppertone Girl and Little Orphan Annie. He is most praised for the brilliant use of colour in his watercolors. One idiosyncratic feature of his artwork is the fact that in the many scenes where characters are portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, many of them, regardless of ostensible gender, have male sex organs. It is speculated by some that Darger was simply unfamiliar with female anatomy, or that he modeled the girls - whom he idolized - after images of the baby Jesus. Other WritingsIn 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." He also kept a diary to chronicle the weather and his daily activities. Darger TodayDarger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death and recognized that it was something extraordinary. Since then, they have become the holders of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger has quickly become something of a superstar in the world of outsider art. At the New York Outsider Art Fair, held every January, and at auction, his work is consistently among the highest priced of an outsider artist. The American Folk Art Museum opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2002, and Intuit in Chicago is currently trying to recreate his apartment for display. Darger in Popular Culture
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