Henry Joseph Darger, Jr. (/ˈdɑrdʒər/; ca. April 12, 1892 –
April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a
custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his
posthumously-discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called
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, 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.
In the Realms of the Unreal
Elsie Paroubek, whose photograph inspired Darger to begin
writing In the Realms of the UnrealIn the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145 page
work bound in fifteen immense, densely-typed volumes (with three of them
consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings
on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades.
The majority of the book, 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, follows the adventures of the daughters of Robert
Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a
daring rebellion against the evil regime of child slavery imposed by John
Manley and the Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and
are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords.
The elaborate mythology includes the setting of a large planet, around which
Earth orbits as a moon (where most people are Christian and mostly Catholic),
and a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short),
gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human
form, even disguising themselves as children. They are usually benevolent, but
some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian
atrocities.
Once released from the asylum, Darger repeatedly attempted
to adopt a child, but his efforts failed. Images of children often served as
his inspiration, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News from May
9, 1911: a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek. The girl had left
home on April 8 of that year telling her mother she was going to visit her aunt
around the corner from her home. She was last seen listening to an organ
grinder with her cousins. Her body was found a month later in a sanitary
district channel near the screen guards of the powerhouse at Lockport, Illinois.
An autopsy found she had probably been suffocated -- not strangled, as is often
stated in articles about Darger. Paroubek's disappearance and murder, her
funeral, and the subsequent investigation, were the subjects of a huge amount
of coverage in the Daily News and other papers at the time.
This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive
of clippings Darger had been gathering. There is no indication that the murder
or the news photo and article had any particular significance for Darger, until
one day he could not find it. Writing in his journal at the time, he began to
process this forfeiture of yet another child, lamenting that "the huge
disaster and calamity" of his loss "will never be atoned for",
but "shall be avenged to the uttermost limit".According to his
autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were
stolen when his locker at work was broken into. He never found his copy of the
photograph again. Because he couldn't remember the exact date of its publication,
he couldn't locate it in the newspaper archive. He carried out an elaborate
series of novenas and other prayers for the picture to be returned.
The fictive war that was sparked by Darger's loss of the
newspaper photograph of the murdered girl, whose killer was never found,[17]
became Darger's magnum opus. He had been working on some version of the novel
before this time (he makes reference to an early draft which was also lost or
stolen), but now it became an all-consuming creation.
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, valiant deeds and exemplary holiness, the Vivian
Girls are hoped to be able to help bring about a triumph of Christianity.
Darger provided two endings to the story, one in which the Vivian Girls and
Christianity are triumphant and another in which 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 not only of
epic films such as Birth of a Nation (which Darger might easily have
seen) but 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.
In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence, Darger
wrote of children's right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right
to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may
have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and
heart."
[edit] Crazy House: Further Adventures in ChicagoA second
work of fiction, provisionally titled Crazy House: Further Adventures in
Chicago, contains over 10,000 handwritten pages. Written after The Realms, it
takes that epic's major characters—the seven Vivian sisters and their
companion/secret brother, Penrod—and places them in Chicago, with the action
unfolding during the same years as that of the earlier book. Begun in 1939, it
is a tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or has
an evil consciousness of its own. 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 the place, but have to resort to arranging for a full-scale
Holy Mass to be held in each room before the house is clean.
The History of My LifeIn 1968, Darger became
interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood and began
writing The History of My Life. Spanning eight volumes, the book only spends
206 pages detailing Darger's early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of
fiction about a huge twister called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on
memories of the tornado he had witnessed in 1908.
Mental healthDespite Darger's unusual lifestyle and strange
behavior, he has not generally been considered mentally ill. This topic is
addressed in the biographical film In the Realms of the Unreal, in which
Darger, while certainly described as eccentric, is also mentioned to be "in
complete control of his life". MacGregor, in the appendix to his book on
Darger, speculates that the most fitting diagnosis is autism, of an Asperger
syndrome type.
[edit] Posthumous fame and influenceDarger's landlords,
Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death, a day
after his birthday, on April 13, 1973. Nathan Lerner, an accomplished
photographer whose long career the New York Times wrote "was inextricably
bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago",
recognized immediately the artistic merit of Darger's work. By this time Darger
was in the Catholic mission St. Augustine's, operated by the Little Sisters of
the Poor, where his father had died.
The Lerners took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing
his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the
Realms of the Unreal. In cooperation with Kiyoko Lerner, Intuit: The Center for
Intuitive and Outsider Art dedicated the Henry Darger Room Collection in
2008 as part of its permanent collection. Darger has become internationally
recognized thanks to the efforts of people who knew to save his works. After
Nathan Lerner's death in 1997, Kiyoko Lerner became the sole figure in charge
of both her husband's and Darger's estates. The U.S. copyright representative
for Estate of Henry Darger and the Estate of Nathan Lerner is the Artists
Rights Society.
Darger is today one of the most famous figures in the
history 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. His work now commands upwards of $80,000.
In the Realms of the Unreal a Bio Documentry on Henry Darger really interesting stuff!
I decided to pick Henry Darger for research because of his incredible life story and how it shaped him as a person and Artist. How he was a loner and worked his whole life to complete his work without communicating much with anyone apart from his characters. In the Realms of the Unreal which is a place he has created to escape and express his own life and his imagination. Where it is his own Utopia in this world and inside his little apartment which is the evidence of his rich inner life.
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