Background

Henry Darger was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on April 12, 1892. He was the son of Henry Darger Sr. and Rosa Fullman. When he was a four-year-old boy, his mother died of puerperal fever after giving birth to a daughter. However, Darger never knew his sister as she was given up for adoption by his father. Later it was discovered that Henry Darger's mother had two children before Henry, but their location was unknown.

Darger considered his father kind and reassuring. They lived together until 1900. That year the mutilated and impoverished Henry Darger Sr. was taken to St. Augustine's Home for the Aged. Darger Sr. died in 1905.

Education

Because of Henry Darger's apparent intellect, he was initially enrolled in public school at the third-grade level. After his father became crippled, Henry Darger was sent away, first to a Roman Catholic orphanage, Mission of Our Lady of Mercy (now Mercy Home for Boys and Girls).

As a result of his continuing misbehaving, he was institutionalized in a state hospital then called the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, also called the Lincoln State School (now the Lincoln Developmental Center), in Lincoln, Illinois. Like many such facilities at the turn of the 20th century, it was a place where societal outcasts, many of whom were mentally ill or mentally disabled, were warehoused and severely mishandled and abandoned. His time in the state hospital was a tough episode in his life that is evident in his drawings and paintings.

The only official diagnosis the doctors managed to establish was that young Henry’s heart was not in the right place. However, according to John M. MacGregor and his discoveries, the true diagnosis was actually self-abuse. Henry Darger himself felt that much of his problem was his ability to see through adult lies. As a result, he became a "smart-aleck". Henry was strictly disciplined by teachers and ganged up on by classmates. Moreover, he went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises, a mysterious illness that may have been a result of a Tourette Syndrome, which irritated others.

Notorious within the city’s limits, the Lincoln asylum's practices comprised of forced labour and severe punishments. All of these horrible factors culminated in Darger’s writings. Henry Darger later confessed that there were also good times at the asylum, for instance, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies.

In 1908, when he was 16, Henry Darger attempted to run away from the asylum by freight train. However, his plan was thwarted by the police when he reached Chicago. He was caught and immediately sent back to the hospital. Darger made a second try in 1909, this time successful.

Career

Initially, Darger took various menial jobs. He was hired as a floor janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital, Burling and Dickens, where he also lived from 1909 to 1922. In 1917 he was drafted into the army and sent to Camp Logan, Texas. However, he was honourably discharged a short time later due to his problems with eyes.

In 1922, Darger quit his job and left his residence at St. Joseph's hospital due to his intense dislike of an autocratic nun, Sister De Paul. Soon, Henry Darger was hired as a dishwasher at Grant Hospital, and he moved to his first apartment in Chicago. In 1932, after fearing that a new landlord might install a still for making illegal liquor in his building and that the still might explode, he relocated to a boardinghouse two blocks away, livind there for the next 40 years.

In 1936 Henry Darger was asked to resign from his job at Grant Hospital by a new supervisor. He wrote later he did not remember the reason of his dismissal, but he assumed that it was because he had been friendly with the previous supervisor, who was the new one's rival. He was then hired again by St. Joseph's Hospital as a dishwasher. In the year of 1947, Darger left this position because the work had become too difficult for him. He joined the staff of Alexian Brothers Hospital, at Belden and Racine, working as a dishwasher, but transferred to the bandage room in 1951.

Always fascinated by the weather, he started to keep the first of his six weather journals on December 31, 1957. He reported on it almost daily from first-hand observations until December 31, 1967. After severe chronic leg pain forced him to leave his job at Alexian Brothers and retire in 1963. Around this time he began his work on The History of My Life, a selective history. After documenting his memories for some 200 pages, Darger later launched into a fictional story about a tornado named "Sweetie Pie" that occupied the remaining 5,000 pages.

In 1969 Darger was hit by a car and never fully recovered from the accident, finding it progressively harder to climb the stairs to his room. He moved to the St. Augustine Home for the Aged in 1972, the very same nursing home in which his father passed away.

After Henry Darger moved to the nursing home, his landlord Nathan Lerner, a photographer, began to clear out Darger's belongings from the room he had occupied. He found a great number of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles, balls of string, piles of newspapers, magazines, comic books, shoes, eyeglasses, and art supplies. He came upon Darger's artwork and writings. When he asked the author what to do with his art and writings, Darger told him to do what he wanted or to "throw it all away." Nathan Lerner, of course, did no such thing.

Among the already noted materials, Darger also possessed a number of journals, in which he was especially prolific once he had retired. There were diaries recording his day-to-day activities, which he kept from March 28, 1968 through January 1, 1972.

Darger’s most outstanding work was an epic that was more than 15,000 pages long, titled "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, or In the Realms of the Unreal". Henry Darger first wrote the story in longhand and later typed it and added illustrations. He created 300 watercolours to accompany his story.

The paintings, some of which measured up to 12 ft (3.7 m) wide, illustrate the children’s vulnerability against their captors. The enslaved children were white, pale, and unclothed. They were typically rendered androgynous or with boys’ genitalia. Darger traced and cut figures from popular-media sources, including children’s books and comics into his work, because, it is believed, he did not have the skill to draw people without them. In addition to watercolour, he also worked in pencil, pastel washes, and collage. Thus Henry Darger is mainly regarded as the paradigmatic outsider artist.

Achievements

• Henry Darger was one of the most outstanding artists in the history of outsider art. The artist became internationally recognized mainly thanks to the efforts of people who saved his œuvre.
  
  Since the 1990s, there have been many references in popular culture to Henry Darger's works by other visual artists among whom were artists of comics and graphic novels; numerous popular songs; a book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery, published in 1999; an online game, Sissyfight 2000, and a multimedia piece by choreographer Pat Graney incorporating Darger images, created in 2004. Besides, Jesse Kellerman's novel The Genius (2008) was inspirated by Darger's story.
  
  Darger and his artworks have become an inspiration for a number of music artists. The Vivian Girls were an all-girl indie/punk trio from Brooklyn; "Henry Darger" is a song by Natalie Merchant on her album Motherland, "Vivian Girls" is song by the band Wussy on their album Left for Dead. In 2011 Majical Cloudz released "Childhood's End", a haunting song influenced by Darger's later life. The song "April 8th" by indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, from their debut studio album "On Avery Island", has also been suggested to be greatly inspired by Darger's life during his later years.
  
  At the Outsider Art Fair, which is 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 in New York established a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001.
  
  After Darger's death, his landlords, Nathan, and Kiyoko Lerner, took responsibility for the Darger estate, publicizing his works and contributing to such projects as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal.
  
  Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in cooperation with Kiyoko Lerner, dedicated him the Henry Darger Room Collection in 2008 as part of its permanent collection. The same year, the exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger", took place; it examined the influence of Darger's œuvre on 11 artists, including Robyn O'Neil, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Amy Cutler.
  
  Nowadays, Henry Darger's paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Collection de l'art brut, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, High Museum of Art, and the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d'Ascq, and the Museum of Old and New Art, in Tasmania; Australia.

Works

More photos

• illustration

  • Untitled

    (Battle Scene during Lightning Storm, Naked Children with ...)

  • Untitled

    (Ornate Interior with Multiple Figures of Girls and blengins.)

  • Untitled

    (Portraits of Glandelinian and High Abbieannian Generals.)

  • Picture One

    (This Scene Here Shows the Murderous Massacre.)

  • 56 At Jennie Richee

    (Vivian Girls caught in insane fury of crazy.)

  • 176 part two

    (Jennie Richee waiting for the rain to stop.)

  • Untitled

    (Blengins Capturing Glandelinian Soldiers.)

  • 145 at Jennie Richee

    (Hard Pressed and Harassaed by the Storm.)

  • Untitled

    (Portrait of Colonel Jack Francis Evans.)

  • At Jullo Callio

    (And again escape and being persued.)

  • General Concentinian Aronburg

    (Father of Annie Aronburg.)

  • Untitled

    (Flag of Glandelinia.)

  • At Jennie Richee Assuming Nuded Appearance

  • At Cedernine Jennie is bruttally treated. No 1 / At Cains Fair They Return

  • We will slam them with our wings

  • Despite outbreak of new storms

  • After Osmondonson they are rescued

  • At Sunbeam Creek

  • 2 At Cederine She Witnesses a Frightful Slaughter of Officers

  • Human Headed Blengins of Calverine Island Catherine Isles

  • Gigantic Roverine

  • 73 At Jennie Richee Escape by Their Help

  • 3 At Jennie Richee are persued down stream

  • 47 at Jennie Richee Break Jail Killing and Wounding Guard

  • At 5 Norma Catherine

  • 195 Are unsuccessfully attacked by Glandelinian soldiers unseen in picture

  • To escape forest fires they enter a volcanic cavern

  • Flag of Calverinia

  • The Pictures of Some of the Most Desperate Fighters in the Glandelinian Armies

  • The most dangerous tornado in formation

  • Christmas seal girls

  • At Angeline junction and strangled

Religion

Darger was a Roman Catholic. In his later years, he daily attended mass and had an intense and vivid relationship with God. Sometimes he attended mass even four times a day.

Views

Quotations: "There is one really important thing I must write which I have forgotten."

"The reason the story runs so much with the little girls are the actual heroes in the warfare is because under most circumstances women are braver than men."

"Do you think i might be fool enough to run away from heaven if I get there?"

Personality

Darger never had any visitors. He spent his later years in conditions of extreme social isolation. Darger was obsessed with children and they often served as his inspiration.

Quotes from others about the person

• Nathan Lerner: "He [Darger] would rarely speak to anyone, but if spoken to would respond politely - always about the weather. He was a remarkable mimic and sometimes there would be an animated quarrel going on between a deep gruff voice, which was supposed to be he, and a querulous high-pitched voice, which was supposed to be his superior, a nun."
  
  Kiyoko Lerner: "[Darger] would walk around the neighborhood picking through garbage - string, magazines, newspapers, books, anything."

Connections

Darger repeatedly attempted to adopt a child, however, his efforts failed.

Father:

Henry Darger Sr.

Mother:

Rosa Fullman

Friend:

William Schloeder

References

• Henry Darger The only book of its kind, Henry Darger offers an authoritative, balanced, and insightful look at an American master.
  2014
• Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy brings alive a complex, brave, and compelling man whose outsider art is both challenging and a triumph over trauma.
  2013
• Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal is a generously illustrated book that represents the culmination of more than a decade of research into the enigmatic artist's life and work by world renowned outsider art expert John MacGregor.
  2002
• Henry Darger's Room: 851 Webster Book by Keizo Kitajima (photographs), Yukiko Koide and Kyoichi Tsuzukimota (text).
  2007
• Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings This book provides the first comprehensive survey of Darger's art and writings.
  2000
• Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders.
  2000