The Double Life Of Outsider Artist Henry Darger
Tom Deflumere
January 25, 1996
The double life of Henry Darger
By Amy Jordan
There are a couple of unwritten rules that govern any visit to an art
museum. You are never supposed to look at a painting or sculpture and
think, "My kindergartner could have done that," or "I could have
thought of that." The other thing that's metaphorically frowned upon
is to view any kind of art as if it's an item for sale in a store,
judging it based on whether you would like it to hang above your sofa.
And even if such thoughts should make their way into your head, most
definitely you should not speak them aloud, unless you're being
"ironic" or trying to get a rise out of somebody.
I'm ashamed to admit that, try as I might to suppress them, my
thoughts often fall into this line of thinking. "The Unreality of
Being," a show of work by outsider artist Henry Darger currently at
the University of Iowa Museum of Art, however, offers curious relief
from this constant struggle. While I enjoyed and appreciated the
prints of Stuart Davis on display in the lower level of the museum,
after a while my thoughts invariably turned to such forbidden
inanities as, "A copy of this print would make a nice gift for a baby
shower." Going upstairs, though, and entering the strange and
fascinating world of Henry Darger quickly shifted my attention away
from myself and my own mundane daily life to a fantasy world that
expresses something much greater and thought-provoking. It brings up
questions as to what art really is, why people make art, and what
amount of knowledge about the artist is necessary--or even ethical or
healthy--to "understand" the work.
The facts of Darger's life and the discovery of his work are
interesting in themselves. Henry Darger was born in 1892, and
following a series of tragic events that included the death of his
mother when he was four (after the birth of his sister who was
subsequently put up for adoption) and the death of his father when
Henry was eight, Henry was diagnosed as feeble-minded and placed in an
institution for children in 1905. He made several attempts to escape
until he finally succeeded in 1908 and found a job in a hospital in
Chicago, doing the sort of menial work he would continue to do until
his retirement. He was shy and reticent and had no friends or visitors
to his small room.
No one knew anything of Darger's secret and other-worldly work until
his death in 1972 when his landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner,
entered Darger's room and found there, among the empty bottles of
Pepto Bismol, stacks of old magazines and newspapers and hundreds of
balls of rolled-up string, an even more curious collection: a
19,000-page, single-spaced, typewritten on legal-size-paper epic tale
of good vs. evil titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is
Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glundeco-Angelinian War
Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion . It traces the history of
wars between the nations of a fictional and unnamed planet. The
heroines of the story are the Vivian sisters, seven prepubescent
princesses from the good Christian nation Abiennia, who fight the evil
Glandelinians, who keep and torture child slaves. Accompanying this
massive work were an autobiography, an extensive weather journal, and
more than 300 watercolor paintings depicting scenes from the story.
The works on display are a selection of these paintings. They range
from average-drawing-pad size to larger eight-to-ten feet-long murals
made from sheets joined together.
Darger painted on both sides of the paper, and the show utilizes
several glass-panel displays to show off this effect. Art historian
John MacGregor, who has been studying Darger's work for the past 10
years and is currently writing a book about him, spoke about the
artist and his work at a lecture at the opening reception on Jan. 19
and again during a gallery tour of the exhibition on Jan. 20. He
explained Darger's system of creating these works, in which he traced
figures from comics, coloring books and newspapers, arranging them in
elaborate compositions of indoor and outdoor settings, adding
interesting and sometimes humorous elements of collage--cut-out
flowers, butterflies, soldiers and cartoon characters.
Since Darger himself had trouble drawing bodies, whenever he needed
figures of a different size or scale, he simply had them
photographically enlarged and traced that into his painting. Favorite
figures are drawn over and over, though it is not immediately apparent
because of the creative variation in placement, color and manipulation
of the figures' arms and legs. He then painted the entire surface with
carefully controlled, beautiful and sophisticated combinations of
watercolor.
While only one of the paintings in the show contains any images of
real violence (a painting in which children are being strangled by the
Glandelinian soldiers), certain aspects of the paintings lend an
overall eerie and disturbing sense to the work. Some of this comes
from the two primary kinds of images used: little girls, both clothed
and unclothed, who are shown to possess the genitalia of little boys;
and adult men, portrayed as officers or cowboys or other enemies. In
his guided tour of the exhibition, MacGregor said that there are many
other violent and disturbing images not included in this particular
show, and that there are even more descriptions of violent acts in the
writings. He suggested that Darger displayed many of the traits and
characteristics of a serial killer, though it appeared he never acted
on any of these impulses. MacGregor recounted a time when he gave a
lecture to a group of psychiatrists, who afterwards ended up debating
the correct diagnosis for Darger, each arguing Darger to have suffered
from his own "specialty."
Such analysis may be beside the point. Whatever the final diagnosis of
Darger's personality may be, we have to keep in mind when looking at
his compelling, private world that it was not created for our eyes. A
more important question may be, why do we need to understand him? And
why does anyone create art in the first place?