Henry Darger (American, 1892–1973)

Henry Darger, 1971, photo by David Berglund

Henry Darger was born in Chicago. His mother died in childbirth when Darger was four years old; his infant sister was immediately put up for adoption. When his father was too ill to care for Darger, he was sent to an orphanage and later committed to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, at the age of seventeen. Two years later Darger escaped from the asylum and ran back to Chicago. In Chicago, Darger held menial jobs and returned home to an empty one and a half bedroom apartment each evening. It wasn’t until his landlord opened the door to this tiny apartment after Darger had moved to a retirement home that his lifelong work was discovered.

Darger’s novel, a 15,145-page epic titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, tells of a world in which Christian factions fight for the freedom of children enslaved, tortured, and murdered by enemies who worship the devil. His novel describes, in horrific detail, the acts of war between good and evil. When writing wasn’t enough to sate his fantasy, Darger moved on to drawing and painting the scenes recounted in his novel. Believing himself an inadequate artist, he adopted figures from contemporary pop culture (specifically from magazines, comic strips, and coloring books)—his art an intertwining of societal ideals and fantasy. Darger mainly drew girls, embracing the ideal of the young girl as embodiment of purity and innocence. The gender ambiguity of some of the naked figures has raised many questions among scholars of Darger’s work.

In this exhibition we see two early drawings that demonstrate Darger’s creative drive as his world overflows from the book page. He designs and draws in awesome detail, completely enthralled by his invented world—escaping the ordinary world and the evil it produces. In Darger’s world, good wins over evil in the end.