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Henry Darger (April 12?, 1892–April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and illustrator who worked as a janitor in the Chicago, Illinois area. He has become famous for his posthumously-discovered 15,143-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 watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story. Darger's work has become one of the most notable examples of outsider art.

One of Darger's paintings
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One of Darger's paintings

Contents

[edit] Life

Darger was born in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated.[citation needed] Cook County records show that he was born at home, 350 24th St.[citation needed] In 1913 he witnessed the complete destruction of the town of Countrybrown, Illinois by a huge tornado[1]. When he was four, his mother Rose (née Fullman) died of puerperal fever after giving birth to a daughter who was given up for adoption. Darger never saw his sister. Biographer John MacGregor has discovered that Rose had had two children before Henry, but their whereabouts are unknown.[citation needed]

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".[citation needed]

At another time, the diagnosis was masturbation.<--rectify with above--> Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result.[citation needed] He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (akin to Tourette Syndrome) which irritated others.[citation needed] <--how does this advance the article--> The Lincoln Asylum's practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into Vivian Girls. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, and he had friends as well as enemies.<--find source and make quote --> While he was there, he received word that his father had died.<-- inconsistent with above --> A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. 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 his brief stint in the U.S. Army[citation needed] , his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services[citation needed] ; 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 a 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" which would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s.<-- add attempt to adopt child here -->

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 well-known posthumously in certain artistic circles for his works due to the efforts of people he knew at saving those works.

Darger has become a name in the world of outsider art. At the New York Outsider Art Fair, held every January, and at auction, his work is among the highest priced of any 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.

[edit] The Story of the Vivian Girls

Darger 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. The Story of the Vivian Girls 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", 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 after vicious torture 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 (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 in amongst several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. He did locate the picture in a public library newspaper archive, but couldn't have it photocopied and attempts to trace it proved futile. As a result, Paroubek, under the name of "Anna Aronburg", became a character in the story. In Vivian Girls, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Anna 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 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 his artwork is an apparent transgenderism: characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender, some females have male sex organs. Some feel Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy, that he meant it as a symbol of power (a chapter of Vivian Girls 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.

[edit] Darger's mental state
The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Much modern fascination with Darger concerns his portrayal of horrific brutality against children. For some reason, it is often assumed that Darger wrote and drew this way because he was enacting repressed subconscious desires; biographer MacGregor claims, without evidence, that Darger may have killed Paroubek, and perhaps other children, and that even if he committed no crime, he "had the mind of a serial killer". It is just as likely that Darger, an abused child who had also witnessed the abuse of others [citation needed] , sought to reveal a truth which polite society did not wish to acknowledge.

[edit] 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 his 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 Vivian Girls is called Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago. Begun in 1939, it is a Stephen King-like tale of a house which is possessed by demons, 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.

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

[edit] Darger in popular culture

  • "Henry Darger" is the title and subject of a song written and performed by Natalie Merchant, which appears on her 2001 album Motherland.
  • Poet John Ashbery wrote Girls on The Run, a book-length prose poem based on Darger's works.
  • Some of the computer graphics in the browser-based game SiSSYFiGHT 2000 were inspired by Darger's paintings.
  • Choreographer Pat Graney created a multimedia piece entitled The Vivian Girls (2004) based on, and incorporating, images from Darger's art.
  • The Vivian Girls is the name of a punk rock band from Melbourne, Australia.
  • Philadelphia-based singer/guitarist Quentin Stoltzfus, better known as Mazarin, has a song titled Henry Darger on his 1999 album, Watch it Happen.
  • Darger is also mentioned in the song, Placentapede by From Autumn to Ashes, in which his loneliness is referenced.
  • The Vivian Girls is the title of a song by Snakefinger, which appears on his 1979 album Chewing Hides the Sound.
  • The cover art of the 2005 Animal Collective album Feels is purportedly an homage to Darger's visual style.
  • Sufjan Stevens' album of outtakes from Illinois, entitled The Avalanche, includes a song entitled The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies.
  • A 1998 painting titled In The Realm of the Unreal (acrylic on panel, mounted on a child's pajamas) by artist Joe Coleman features images of Henry Darger, his characters, imagery and literary work.
  • Famous rock-and-roll poster artist Jermaine Rogers has cited Henry Darger as a major influence.
  • Lost Girls a song by the indie band Tilly and the Wall, is based on Darger's work.
  • In The Realms of the Unreal, an album by Burton Wagner is based on Darger's work.
  • Hans Rickheit and co-writer Ria collaborated on a minicomic based on Darger's life and works, entitled The Warstorm, with some details changed, such as Darger's name.
  • The Vivian Girls Experience is a folk/pop musical project which incorporates many of Darger's themes and characters into song form. The band is based in Philadelphia/New York and is a collaborative project between artists Enid Crow and Justin Duerr.

[edit] Trivia

This article appears to contradict itself. Please see the discussion on the talk page.
  • Darger's posthumous biographer, the psychoanalyst John M. MacGregor has speculated that Darger may have been the culprit of the 1911 strangling of Elsie Paroubek([2]). MacGregor later defended his psychoanalytic view of Darger, but denied that he accused him of murder ([3]).

[edit] References

  1. ^ [1]
  • Bourrit, Bernard. Henry Darger. Espace mouvant. in "La Part de l'Oeil" n°20, Bruxelles, 2005: 252-259.
  • Morrison, C. L. The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress: Looking for Henry Darger. 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
  • MacGregor, John. Henry Darger: In The Realms of the Unreal. Delano Greenidge Editions: New York, 2002. ISBN 0-929445-15-5.
  • Bonesteel, Michael. Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. 2000

[edit] External links

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