Henry Darger
Encyclopedia
Henry Joseph Darger, Jr. (ca. April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 and artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 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
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

.

Life

Darger was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Rosa Fullman and Henry Joseph Darger, Sr. He is believed to have been born on April 12, 1892, though his exact date of birth is a subject of debate. A record exists of his U.S. draft registration card, filled out on June 2, 1917 during the First World War, which lists his birth date as April 17, 1892.

Cook County records show that he was born at his home, located at 350 W. 24th Street in Chicago. When he was four years old, his mother died after having given birth to a daughter, who was given up for adoption
Adoption
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents...

; Henry Darger never knew his sister. Darger's biographer, the art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rosa had two children before Henry, but did not discover their whereabouts.

By Darger's own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind and reassuring 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 in Lincoln, Illinois
Lincoln, Illinois
Lincoln is a city in Logan County, Illinois, United States. It is the only town in the United States that was named for Abraham Lincoln before he became president; he practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. First settled in the 1830s, Lincoln is home to three colleges and two prisons. The three...

, with the diagnosis, according to Stephen Prokopoff, that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place." According to John MacGregor, the diagnosis was actually "self-abuse" (at the time, this term was a euphemism
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...

 for masturbation
Masturbation
Masturbation refers to sexual stimulation of a person's own genitals, usually to the point of orgasm. The stimulation can be performed manually, by use of objects or tools, or by some combination of these methods. Masturbation is a common form of autoeroticism...

, rather than self-injury).

Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a 'smart-aleck' as a result, which often led to his being disciplined by teachers and ganged up on by classmates. He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (perhaps as a result of Tourette Syndrome
Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical tics and at least one vocal tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane...

) which irritated others. The Lincoln asylum's practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into In the Realms of the Unreal. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies. While he was there, he received word that his father had died. A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he walked back to Chicago from the asylum for "feeble-minded children" in Lincoln, and it was on this journey that he witnessed a huge tornado
Tornado
A tornado is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a wider...

 that devastated the central Illinois area. He described it as "a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man's conception". There was a tornado that hit the eastern edge of Tampico, Illinois
Tampico, Illinois
Tampico is a village located in Tampico Township, Whiteside County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2010 census the village had a total population of 790, up from 772 at the 2000 census. U.S. President Ronald Reagan was born there and lived there for two brief periods of his...

, on November 25, 1908, at 7 p.m. Many barns, windmills and out buildings were turned over, smashed and demolished. Dwellings suffered a small amount of damage. No one was injured and no livestock killed. Tampico is located about 40 miles east-northeast of Moline and approximately 110 miles west of Chicago and 125 miles due north of Lincoln.

The 16-year-old returned to Chicago and, with the help of his godmother, found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself until his retirement in 1963.

Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Mass
Mass (liturgy)
"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...

 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, although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended. He was largely solitary; his one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind 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, but he and Darger stayed in touch through letters until Shloder's death in 1959.

In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's North Side, at 851 W. Webster Avenue, in the Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park, Chicago
Lincoln Park, is one of the 77 community areas on Chicago, Illinois North Side, USA. Named after Lincoln Park, a vast park bordering Lake Michigan, the community area is anchored by the Lincoln Park Zoo and DePaul University...

 section of the city, near the DePaul University
DePaul University
DePaul University is a private institution of higher education and research in Chicago, Illinois. Founded by the Vincentians in 1898, the university takes its name from the 17th century French priest Saint Vincent de Paul...

 campus. 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, a day after his birthday, on April 13, 1973. Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner was an influential Chicago photographer whose work helped define his city. The New York Times wrote that his work "was inextricably bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago" He was Henry Darger's landlord and discovered Darger's work shortly before his death.-External...

, 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
Little Sisters of the Poor
The Little Sisters of the Poor is a Roman Catholic religious order for women. It was founded in the 19th century by Saint Jeanne Jugan near Rennes, France. Jugan felt the need to care for the many impoverished elderly who lined the streets of French towns and cities.This led her to welcome an...

, 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
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of and appreciation for intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition. Since its founding in 1991, Intuit has emerged as an international...

 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 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
Artists Rights Society
Artists Rights Society is a copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the United States. Founded in 1987, ARS represents the intellectual property rights interests of over 50,000 visual artists and estates of visual artists from around the world .- Member Artists &...

.

Darger is buried in All Saints
All Saints
All Saints' Day , often shortened to All Saints, is a solemnity celebrated on 1 November by parts of Western Christianity, and on the first Sunday after Pentecost in Eastern Christianity, in honour of all the saints, known and unknown...

 Cemetery
Cemetery
A cemetery is a place in which dead bodies and cremated remains are buried. The term "cemetery" implies that the land is specifically designated as a burying ground. Cemeteries in the Western world are where the final ceremonies of death are observed...

 in Des Plaines, Illinois
Des Plaines, Illinois
Des Plaines is a city in Cook County, Illinois, United States. It has adopted the official nickname of "City of Destiny." As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 58,720. It is a suburb of Chicago, and is next to O'Hare International Airport...

, in a plot called "The Old People of the Little Sisters of the Poor Plot." Darger's headstone is inscribed "Artist" and "Protector of Children."

In the Realms of the Unreal

Darger's work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal 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 Abbieannia and who assist a daring rebellion against the evil John Manley's regime of child slavery
Child slavery
-History:In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or for crimes. Sometimes this is also to give the children a better life than what they had with their family....

 imposed by the Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...

d by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology also includes 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.

In the Realms of the Unreal includes 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, and extends over 15 immense, densely-typed volumes of 15,145 total pages. The text is accompanied by three bound volumes of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper, the work of six decades, derived from magazines and coloring books. In addition, Darger wrote an eight volume, 5,084-page autobiography, The History of my Life; a 10-year daily weather journal; assorted diaries; and a second work of fiction, provisionally titled Crazy House, of over 10,000 handwritten pages.

Once released from the asylum, Darger attempted to adopt a child, but his repeated efforts failed. Images of children often served as his inspiration, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News
Chicago Daily News
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper published between 1876 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.-History:The Daily News was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty in 1875 and began publishing early the next year...

 from May 9, 1911: a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek
Elsie Paroubek
Elsie Paroubek was a Czech-American girl who was the victim of kidnapping and murder in the spring of 1911. Her disappearance and the subsequent search for her preoccupied Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota law enforcement for six weeks, and her funeral was attended by between 2,000 and 3,000 people...

. 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
Lockport, Illinois
Lockport is a city in Will County, Illinois, United States, that incorporated in 1853. Lockport is located in northeastern Illinois, 30 miles southwest of Chicago, and north of Joliet, at locks connecting Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal with the Des Plaines River via the Lockport...

. 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
Atonement
Atonement is a doctrine that describes how human beings can be reconciled to God. In Christian theology the atonement refers to the forgiving or pardoning of sin through the death of Jesus Christ by crucifixion, which made possible the reconciliation between God and creation...

 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 novena
Novena
In the Catholic Church, a novena is a devotion consisting of a prayer repeated on nine successive days, asking to obtain special graces. The prayers may come from prayer books, or consist of the recitation of the Rosary , or of short prayers through the day...

s 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, became Darger's magnum opus
Magnum opus
Magnum opus , from the Latin meaning "great work", refers to the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of a writer, artist, or composer.-Related terms:Sometimes the term magnum opus is used to refer to simply "a great work" rather than "the...

. 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
Child labor
Child labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This practice is considered exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in many countries...

 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
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

. 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
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....

, 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
Coppertone girl
Coppertone is the brand name for an American sunscreen, owned by Merck, formerly Schering-Plough. Coppertone is the sister brand to Bain de Soleil, which is targeted to adult females....

 and Little Annie Rooney
Little Annie Rooney
Little Annie Rooney was a comic strip about a young orphaned girl who traveled about with her dog, Zero. King Features Syndicate launched the strip on January 10, 1927, not long after it was apparent that the Chicago Tribune Syndicate had scored a huge hit with Little Orphan Annie.Although the King...

. 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 martyr
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...

s like the early saint
Saint
A saint is a holy person. In various religions, saints are people who are believed to have exceptional holiness.In Christian usage, "saint" refers to any believer who is "in Christ", and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or in earth...

s. One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is an apparent transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

ism: Characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

, some females have penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...

es.

In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence
Declaration of independence
A declaration of independence is an assertion of the independence of an aspiring state or states. Such places are usually declared from part or all of the territory of another nation or failed nation, or are breakaway territories from within the larger state...

, 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."

Darger's mental health

Despite 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 the Realms of the Unreal
In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary about outsider artist Henry Darger. Darger is known for his 15,143-page fantasy manuscript entitled 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...

, 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
Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...

, of an Asperger syndrome
Asperger syndrome
Asperger's syndrome that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development...

 type.

In the last entry in his diary, before his April 1973 death, he wrote: "January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now.... I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am..."

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
Tornado
A tornado is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a wider...

 called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on memories of the tornado he had witnessed in 1908. 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 as a boy was brought under investigation in a huge scandal shortly before he left and he might have seen victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked.

A 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.

Posthumous fame and influence

Darger is one of the most famous figures in the history of outsider art
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

. At the Outsider Art Fair, held every January in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, and at auction, his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum
American Folk Art Museum
The American Folk Art Museum is a museum devoted to American folk art, as well as the work of international self-taught artists. It has branches at 45 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan .In May 2011 the Museum of Modern Art bought its 53rd Street location...

, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001. His work now commands upwards of $80,000.

In 2008, the Henry Darger Room Collection opened to the public as part of a permanent installation at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of and appreciation for intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition. Since its founding in 1991, Intuit has emerged as an international...

 in Chicago. The room is an evocation of the living space meticulously recreated from Darger's small northside Chicago apartment.

Also in 2008, the exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger," examined the influence of Darger's oeuvre on 11 artists, including Trenton Doyle Hancock
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Trenton Doyle Hancock is an American artist. He was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and grew up in Paris, Texas.Hancock received a BFA from Texas A&M University, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia...

, Robyn O'Neil
Robyn O'Neil
Robyn O'Neil is an American artist known for her large scale graphite on paper drawings.O'Neil received a BFA from Texas A&M University-Commerce, TX and did graduate work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also studied at King's College London. O'Neil's narrative drawings most often...

, and Amy Cutler, who were responding not only to the aesthetic nature of Darger's mythic work — with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and its transgressive undertone — but also to his driven work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking.

Darger is the subject of a radio play, Darger and the Detective, by Mike Walker
Mike Walker (radio dramatist)
Mike Walker is a radio dramatist and feature and documentary writer. His radio work includes both original plays and adaptations of novels, classical and modern...

 performed by members of the Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Tony Award-winning Chicago theatre company founded in 1974 by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry in the basement of a church in Highland Park, Illinois. It has since relocated to Chicago's Halsted Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Its name comes from...

 for BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...

.

Darger in popular culture

Since his death in 1973 and the discovery of his massive opus, and especially since the 1990s, there have been many references in popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

 to Darger's work—references by other visual artists (including, but not limited to, artists of comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...

 and graphic novels); numerous popular songs; a 1999 book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

; a multi-player online game, SiSSYFiGHT 2000
SiSSYFiGHT 2000
Sissyfight 2000 was a turn-based strategy online game developed by the Word online magazine staff, including executive producer Marisa Bowe, lead programmer Ranjit Bhatnagar and art director Yoshi Sodeoka, with game designer Eric Zimmerman, written in Shockwave. It was launched in 2000.The...

, and a 2004 multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 piece by choreographer
Choreography
Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself, which is sometimes expressed by means of dance notation. The word choreography literally means "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" ...

 Pat Graney incorporating Darger images. Jesse Kellerman
Jesse Kellerman
Jesse Kellerman is an American novelist and playwright. He has published four novels: Sunstroke , Trouble , The Genius , and The Executor...

's 2008 novel The Genius took part of its inspiration from Darger's story. These artists have variously drawn from and responded to Darger's artistic style, his themes (especially the Vivian Girls, the young heroines of Darger's massive illustrated novel), and the events in his life.

Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu
Jessica Lingman Yu is an American film director, writer, producer, and editor. She has worked on documentaries, dramatic films, and television shows. Yu won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien .-Early life:Yu graduated from Gunn...

's 2004 documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 In the Realms of the Unreal
In the Realms of the Unreal
In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary about outsider artist Henry Darger. Darger is known for his 15,143-page fantasy manuscript entitled 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...

 details Darger's life and artworks.

Comic book artist Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium...

 refers to Darger's work in his book Making Comics, while describing the danger artists encounter in the creation of a character's back-story. McCloud says that complicated narratives can easily spin out of control when too much unseen information is built up around the characters.

Darger and his work have been an inspiration for much popular music. The Vivian Girls
Vivian Girls
Vivian Girls are an American band from Brooklyn, New York.- History :Vivian Girls, named after the magnum opus of outsider author Henry Darger, started in Brooklyn, NY in March 2007 as the trio of Cassie Ramone ; Katy "Kickball Katy" Goodman; and Frankie Rose...

 are all-girl indie/punk trio from Brooklyn; "Henry Darger" is a song by Natalie Merchant
Natalie Merchant
Natalie Anne Merchant is an American singer-songwriter and musician. She joined the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs in 1981 and left it to begin her solo career in 1993.-Early life:...

 on her album Motherland
Motherland (Natalie Merchant album)
Motherland is the third solo album by Natalie Merchant, released in 2001. It was her last mainstream record to be released via her label Elektra Records...

, "Vivian Girls" is song by the band Wussy
Wussy
Wussy is an indie rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio, that formed in 2001. The group has received critical acclaim from such sources as Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau, and SPIN Magazine.-Members:*Chuck Cleaver – Vocals, Guitar*Lisa Walker – Vocals, Guitar...

 on their album Left for Dead, "The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies" is a song by Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens is an American singer-songwriter and musician born in Detroit, Michigan. Stevens first began releasing his music on Asthmatic Kitty, a label co-founded with his stepfather, beginning with the 1999 release, A Sun Came...

 on his album The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album, "Segue: In the Realms of the Unreal" is song by the band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is an American alternative rock band from Austin, Texas. The chief creative members of the band are Jason Reece and Conrad Keely . The two switch between drumming, guitar and lead vocals, both on recordings and live shows...

 on their album So Divided
So Divided
So Divided is an album by ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead released on November 14, 2006. It saw the band continuing to expand its sound, along the lines of its predecessor Worlds Apart....

, "The Vivian Girls" is a 1979 song by Snakefinger
Snakefinger
Philip Charles Lithman , who performed under the stage name Snakefinger, was an English musician, singer and songwriter. A multi-instrumentalist, he was best known for his guitar and violin work and his collaborations with The Residents.-History:Lithman was born in Tooting, South London, and came...

 (Philip Lithman Roth) also recorded by the Monks of Doom
Monks of Doom
The Monks of Doom are an American alternative rock band, formed in California in 1986. Working within the indie rock aesthetic framework , the band's music drew from post-punk, progressive rock and folk rock traditions...

 on their album The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, "Vivian girls" is a song by the band Fucked Up
Fucked Up
Fucked Up is a hardcore punk band from Toronto, Canada. The band won the 2009 Polaris Music Prize for the album The Chemistry of Common Life.-History:The band formed and played their first shows in early 2001...

 on their album Hidden World, "Lost girls" (about Darger's work) is a song by Tilly and the Wall
Tilly and the Wall
Tilly and the Wall is an indie pop group from Omaha, Nebraska. Their name originated from a children's book called Tillie and the Wall, written by Leo Lionni...

 on their album Bottoms and Barrels, and "Henry D." (about Darger) is a song by the band Peter and the Wolf on their album Fireflies.

Collections and exhibits

Darger’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 and the American Folk Art Museum
American Folk Art Museum
The American Folk Art Museum is a museum devoted to American folk art, as well as the work of international self-taught artists. It has branches at 45 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan .In May 2011 the Museum of Modern Art bought its 53rd Street location...

 in New York, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of and appreciation for intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition. Since its founding in 1991, Intuit has emerged as an international...

 (Chicago), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne).

Darger’s art also has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including “The Unreality of Being,” curated by Stephen Prokopoff (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1996; Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1997). It was also seen in “Disasters of War” (P.S. 1, New York, 2000), where it was presented alongside prints from the famous Francisco de Goya series The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War
The Disasters of War are a series of 8280 prints in the first published edition , for which the last two plates were not available. See "Execution". prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya...

 and works derived from these by the British contemporary-art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo...

. Earlier this year, an entire gallery was devoted to Darger’s drawings in “Dubuffet and Art Brut” at the Museum Kunst Palast, in Düsseldorf; that exhibition will open at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole on October 10 (and run through February 1, 2006). Darger’s work has also been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Collection de l’Art Brut. Darger’s art has also been featured in exhibitions at La Maison Rouge (Paris) and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco).

In 2008, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of and appreciation for intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition. Since its founding in 1991, Intuit has emerged as an international...

 in Chicago opened its permanent exhibit of the Henry Darger Room - an installation that is an evocation of the living space from the Chicago apartment where Darger lived and made his art. It is the only existing location open to the public which shows a glimpse into the artist's personal living quarters.

Selected public collections

  • Museum of Modern Art
    Museum of Modern Art
    The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

     (New York)
  • American Folk Art Museum (New York)
  • New Orleans Museum of Art
  • Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago)
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago)
  • Milwaukee Art Museum
  • Walker Art Center
    Walker Art Center
    The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

     (Minneapolis)
  • Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin)
  • National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian, Washington D.C.)
  • High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA)
  • Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne)
  • Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art
    Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art
    The Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art , formerly known as Villeneuve d'Ascq Museum of Modern Art, is an art museum located in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France....

     (Villeneuve d'Ascq
    Villeneuve d'Ascq
    Villeneuve-d'Ascq is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. With more than 60,000 inhabitants, it is one of the main cities of the Urban Community of Lille Métropole and the largest in area after Lille ; it is also one of the main cities of the Nord-Pas de Calais region.Built up...

    )

Sources

  • Anderson, Brooke Davis. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum
    American Folk Art Museum
    The American Folk Art Museum is a museum devoted to American folk art, as well as the work of international self-taught artists. It has branches at 45 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan .In May 2011 the Museum of Modern Art bought its 53rd Street location...

    . New York: American Folk Art Museum
    American Folk Art Museum
    The American Folk Art Museum is a museum devoted to American folk art, as well as the work of international self-taught artists. It has branches at 45 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan .In May 2011 the Museum of Modern Art bought its 53rd Street location...

     in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.
  • Ashbery, John. Girls on the Run: A Poem. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999.
  • Bonesteel, Michael (ed.). Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.
  • Bourrit, Bernard. Henry Darger: Espace mouvant. In "La Part de l'Oeil" n° 20, Bruxelles, 2005: 252–259.
  • Collins, Paul, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ISBN 1582343675
  • Jones, Finn-Olaf, "Landlord's Fantasy," Forbes, April 25, 2005.
  • Kitajima, Keizo (photographs), and Koide, Yukiko and Tsuzukimota, Kyoichi (text), Henry Darger's Room: 851 Webster. Tokyo, Japan: Imperial Press, 2007.
  • MacGregor, John M. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. New York: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2002. ISBN 0929445155.
  • Morrison, C. L. The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress: Looking for Henry Darger. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005.
  • Schjeldahl, Peter. Folks, The New Yorker
    The New Yorker
    The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

    , January 14, 2002: 88–89.
  • Peter Schjeldahl's illustrated review of an exhibit of Darger's art at the American Folk Art Museum
    American Folk Art Museum
    The American Folk Art Museum is a museum devoted to American folk art, as well as the work of international self-taught artists. It has branches at 45 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan .In May 2011 the Museum of Modern Art bought its 53rd Street location...

     in New York City
    New York City
    New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

    .
  • Shaw, Lytle, The Moral Storm: Henry Darger's "Book of Weather Reports", Cabinet. An examination of Darger's 10-year weather diaries and their relation to his work and to Christian painting.
  • William Swislow's review of "Henry Darger: Desperate and Terrible Questions," The Outsider.
  • Perry, Grayson, and Jones, Wendy, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Vintage, 2007. ISBN 9780099485162.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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