[wordup] The Story of Henry Darger

[Adam Shand]

Sad, beautiful and wonderful.

Adam.

Via: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/17/the-jet-propelled-co.html#comment-591844
Source: http://www.hammergallery.com/Artists/darger/Darger.htm
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger



REALMS OF THE UNREAL
By Stephen Prokopoff

Henry Darger was one of those people hardly anyone notices, who,  
seemingly, move through life as shadows.  Born in 1892, possibly in  
Brazil or in Germany by his various accounts and perhaps bearing the  
surname, Dargarius, young Henry lived with his father- "a tailor and a  
kind and easygoing man" in Chicago until 1900.  In that year the elder  
and crippled Darger had to be taken to live in a Catholic Mission and  
his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home.  Darger Sr. died in 1905  
and his son was institutionalized as feeble-minded, apparently on the  
basis of a doctor's diagnosis that "Little Henry's heart is not in the  
right place."  A series of escapes ended successfully in 1908.  The 16- 
year-old Darger found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in  
this fashion continued to support himself for the following 50 years.   
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; he was a solitary.  In 1930 he 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.

             Amid a thick accumulation of debris- including hundreds  
of Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old  
newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious kitsch and much more-  
his landlord, the photographer Nathan Lerner, found a creative life's  
work: an enormous literary and pictorial production.  The key element  
was a picaresque tale in 12 massive volumes composed of some 19,000  
pages of legal-sized paper filled with single-spaced typing entitled  
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the  
Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child  
Slave Rebellion.  The origins of this epic appear to be in 1909.  It  
took more than eleven years to write it in longhand; in 1912 Darger  
began the task of typing the still incomplete manuscript.

             The story recounts the wars between the nations on an  
enormous and unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon.  The conflict  
is provoked by the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement.  
After hundreds of ferocious battles, the good Christian nation of  
Abbiennia forces the “haughty” Glandelinians to give up their  
barbarous ways.  The heroines of Darger’s history are the seven Vivian  
sisters, Abbiennian princesses.  They are sided in their struggles by  
a panoply of heroes, who are sometimes the author’s alter-egos.  The  
battles are full of vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures,  
storms and explosions, the appearance of demons and dragons.  Darger  
possessed a wealth of information about military matters and  
particularly about the Civil War.  Not surprisingly the details of  
battles are recorded in precise quartermaster style in supplemental  
volumes.  In one, for example, he carefully drew and colored the  
hundreds of flags of the warring nations.  Another lists literally  
thousands of names of officers in the contending armies and their  
fates (among these, some are described as “killed” while others are  
“mortally wounded”.)  The true heroes of these adventures, however,  
are children- the favorites of God, according to the author.  The  
epic’s happy conclusion is only reached after his young protagonists  
survive great trials, including humiliation, enslavement and torture.

             By far the most important supplement to the book,  
however, exists in the several hundred watercolor paintings Darger  
left in his room, many of them illustrations for The Realms of the  
Unreal.  They transform Darger’s apocalyptic text into a body of  
images that are among the most original and beautiful in outsider  
art.  These works- pencil drawings on paper painted over with  
watercolor and occasional additions of collage- illustrate incidents  
in the book with a precision and amplitude of detail not possible in a  
written narrative.  Textual annotations are also typically parts of  
these compositions, suggesting that picturing the reality of the event  
by every means available was a pressing need for the artist.  The  
sizes of Darger’s work range from the measurements of standard drawing  
pads to mural-sized works made of joined sheets of 3 or 4 feet high  
and as much as 10 to 12 feet long.  The sheer number of large format  
works makes it clear that Darger conceived the epic format as  
appropriate to the dimensions of his vision.  Because artists’  
materials were costly, Darger’s sheets usually contain finished,  
independent compositions on both sides.  The logistics of how Darger  
was able to work on these large pictures in the cramped quarters he  
occupied are remarkable.  The only conclusion possible is that he  
worked in the manner of scroll painters- one segment at a time.  But  
if this is the case, memory had to be relied upon to govern the  
overall coherence of these exceedingly complex compositions.

             There is little purpose to add to the polemic that has  
continued over the last several decades concerning the artistic  
validity of outsider art.  The great emotional and formal beauties  
found in the best examples of this work as well as its profound  
influence on “high art” in our time would appear to have settled the  
matter.  Darger was certainly an untutored artist in any traditional  
sense and his work, like that of other outsiders, stands outside of  
the history of art.  He probably never visited a museum and had only  
very limited exposure to art.  Yet his creative sensibility was such  
that it was possible for him to spin gold from the daily experience  
and fantasy, which in his mind easily co-mingled. If Darger was  
largely ignorant of art in the museums, he was in close touch with the  
abundant imagery of popular culture available to the pack-rat  
collector. Topical events are continually reflected in his texts and  
images just as cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, comic books and  
religious tracts easily found a place in his visual narratives.

             Like all genuine talents, Darger developed a set of  
techniques that was at once individual and entirely adequate to his  
expressive requirements. He was at best a mediocre draftsman, for  
example, having particular trouble with human figures.  Yet Darger  
created an art filled with legions of figures whose images were  
appropriated.  Darger’s method was to simply trace images from  
children’s book illustrations, comic strips and similar sources.  If  
the needed image was not of the required size, the artist would take  
it to the photography counter of a near-by drugstore and have it  
enlarged or reduced to the proper measurements.  Frequently favorite  
images were repeated in a given picture as well as additional works.  
Other elements deemed suitable- butterfly cut-outs, Mickey Mouse and  
Donald Duck, fragments from coloring books and game boards and many  
more- were confiscated into Darger’s pictures and, because of the easy  
alliance in them of the real and the imagined, seemed perfectly at home.

             Darger’s particular brilliance lies in a keen  
organizational sense.  His major compositions bring together massive  
casts of characters in ways that surely would have gladdened the heart  
of a Cecil B. DeMille.  These elaborate forces are deployed with a  
sure eye for intricate, often cunningly balanced relationships that  
activate the entire picture plane.  Darger’s compositions are commonly  
set in expansive landscapes or, somewhat less frequently, in  
interiors, both particularly well-suited to the horizontal format he  
favored.

             There is a constant attention to the distribution of  
visual incident over both ground, sky or wall planes.  Darger’s skies,  
for example, are always active, often with storm clouds and networks  
of lightning or with cloud forms containing double images of figures  
or faces. As a child, Darger witnessed a devastating tornado, and  
skies with rolling clouds and electrical fireworks are often present  
in his more turbulent scenes.  I benign settings the artist contrives  
rich and colorful patterns in depictions of crowds of children,  
flowers and radiantly colored insects.

             One of the most appealing and consistently rewarding  
aspects of Darger’s art is his sumptuous feeling for color.  His  
richly orchestrated palette reinforces compositional structure and  
provides treasures of felicitous and often unexpected harmonies.  Even  
in the most pale and subtle combinations of hue, Darger establishes  
chromatic relationships that are opulently atmospheric.

             Darger’s imagery, when it details mayhem and sometimes  
the lurid mistreatment of little girls, can be distressing.  An  
observer characterized a picture in a sunny landscape in which images  
of children, exotic flowers, butterflies and exploding bombs were  
joined as “being like Beirut.”  The only possible response in such  
instances is that art, being often fashioned from artists’ obsessions,  
is rarely a vehicle for the description of perfection: Darger created  
art from the visions available to him.

             Viewers are also perplexed by the clearly androgynous  
anatomy of Darger’s nymphettes, curiously enough a trait never in  
evidence among the seven angelic Vivian girls.  It is not possible to  
fathom the causes or intricacies of Darger’s fantasies, but it should  
be said that his public behavior appears to have been without  
blemish.  A saintly man who frequently attended Mass, Darger saw  
himself as the ardent protector of children. He could, therefore, in  
his words and images, subject his creatures to terrible trials from  
which it was in his power to rescue them.  The wars, fires and  
tempests that form the context of his art undoubtedly reflect an  
unconscious conflict that seems to have given him little respite.  God  
was Darger’s protagonist and consequently the conflict could be  
nothing less than cosmic.  This poignant struggle is extensively  
documented in the artist’s diaries, which record by turns his pleading  
and rancorous exchanges with the Creator.  If Darger’s fantasies often  
hovered on the fringes of sanity, his art enabled him to transform his  
obsessions into a luminous production that, in its best moments,  
transcends the pain and circumstances of its making.

- from A Personal Recollection by Nathan Lerner




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