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REALMS OF THE
UNREAL
By
Stephen Prokopoff
Henry Darger was one of
those people hardly anyone notices, who, seemingly, move
through life as shadows. Born in 1892, possibly in
Brazil or in Germany by his various accounts and perhaps
bearing the surname, Dargarius, young Henry lived with
his father- "a tailor and a kind and easygoing man" in
Chicago until 1900. In that year the elder and crippled
Darger had to be taken to live in a Catholic Mission and
his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr.
died in 1905 and his son was institutionalized as
feeble-minded, apparently on the basis of a doctor's
diagnosis that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right
place." A series of escapes ended successfully in
1908. The 16-year-old Darger found menial employment in
a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to
support himself for the following 50 years. His life
took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he
attended Mass 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;
he was a solitary. In 1930 he settled into a
second-floor room on Chicago's north side. It was in
this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in
1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was
discovered.
Amid a thick
accumulation of debris- including hundreds of
Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string,
old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious
kitsch and much more- his landlord, the photographer
Nathan Lerner, found a creative life's work: an enormous
literary and pictorial production. The key element was
a picaresque tale in 12 massive volumes composed of some
19,000 pages of legal-sized paper filled with
single-spaced typing entitled 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. The origins of this epic appear to
be in 1909. It took more than eleven years to write it
in longhand; in 1912 Darger began the task of typing the
still incomplete manuscript.
The story
recounts the wars between the nations on an enormous and
unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon. The conflict
is provoked by the Glandelinians, who practice
child enslavement. After hundreds of ferocious battles,
the good Christian nation of Abbiennia forces the
“haughty” Glandelinians to give up their barbarous
ways. The heroines of Darger’s history are the seven
Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses. They are sided
in their struggles by a panoply of heroes, who are
sometimes the author’s alter-egos. The battles are full
of vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures,
storms and explosions, the appearance of demons and
dragons. Darger possessed a wealth of information about
military matters and particularly about the Civil War.
Not surprisingly the details of battles are recorded in
precise quartermaster style in supplemental volumes. In
one, for example, he carefully drew and colored the
hundreds of flags of the warring nations. Another lists
literally thousands of names of officers in the
contending armies and their fates (among these, some are
described as “killed” while others are “mortally
wounded”.) The true heroes of these adventures,
however, are children- the favorites of God, according
to the author. The epic’s happy conclusion is only
reached after his young protagonists survive great
trials, including humiliation, enslavement and torture.
By far the
most important supplement to the book, however, exists
in the several hundred watercolor paintings Darger left
in his room, many of them illustrations for The
Realms of the Unreal. They transform Darger’s
apocalyptic text into a body of images that are among
the most original and beautiful in outsider art. These
works- pencil drawings on paper painted over with
watercolor and occasional additions of collage-
illustrate incidents in the book with a precision and
amplitude of detail not possible in a written
narrative. Textual annotations are also typically parts
of these compositions, suggesting that picturing the
reality of the event by every means available was a
pressing need for the artist. The sizes of Darger’s
work range from the measurements of standard drawing
pads to mural-sized works made of joined sheets of 3 or
4 feet high and as much as 10 to 12 feet long. The
sheer number of large format works makes it clear that
Darger conceived the epic format as appropriate to the
dimensions of his vision. Because artists’ materials
were costly, Darger’s sheets usually contain finished,
independent compositions on both sides. The logistics
of how Darger was able to work on these large pictures
in the cramped quarters he occupied are remarkable. The
only conclusion possible is that he worked in the manner
of scroll painters- one segment at a time. But if this
is the case, memory had to be relied upon to govern the
overall coherence of these exceedingly complex
compositions.
There is
little purpose to add to the polemic that has continued
over the last several decades concerning the artistic
validity of outsider art. The great emotional and
formal beauties found in the best examples of this work
as well as its profound influence on “high art” in our
time would appear to have settled the matter. Darger
was certainly an untutored artist in any traditional
sense and his work, like that of other outsiders, stands
outside of the history of art. He probably never
visited a museum and had only very limited exposure to
art. Yet his creative sensibility was such that it was
possible for him to spin gold from the daily experience
and fantasy, which in his mind easily co-mingled. If
Darger was largely ignorant of art in the museums, he
was in close touch with the abundant imagery of popular
culture available to the pack-rat collector. Topical
events are continually reflected in his texts and images
just as cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, comic
books and religious tracts easily found a place in his
visual narratives.
Like all
genuine talents, Darger developed a set of techniques
that was at once individual and entirely adequate to his
expressive requirements. He was at best a mediocre
draftsman, for example, having particular trouble with
human figures. Yet Darger created an art filled with
legions of figures whose images were appropriated.
Darger’s method was to simply trace images from
children’s book illustrations, comic strips and similar
sources. If the needed image was not of the required
size, the artist would take it to the photography
counter of a near-by drugstore and have it enlarged or
reduced to the proper measurements. Frequently favorite
images were repeated in a given picture as well as
additional works. Other elements deemed suitable-
butterfly cut-outs, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck,
fragments from coloring books and game boards and many
more- were confiscated into Darger’s pictures and,
because of the easy alliance in them of the real and the
imagined, seemed perfectly at home.
Darger’s
particular brilliance lies in a keen organizational
sense. His major compositions bring together massive
casts of characters in ways that surely would have
gladdened the heart of a Cecil B. DeMille. These
elaborate forces are deployed with a sure eye for
intricate, often cunningly balanced relationships that
activate the entire picture plane. Darger’s
compositions are commonly set in expansive landscapes
or, somewhat less frequently, in interiors, both
particularly well-suited to the horizontal format he
favored.
There is a
constant attention to the distribution of visual
incident over both ground, sky or wall planes. Darger’s
skies, for example, are always active, often with storm
clouds and networks of lightning or with cloud forms
containing double images of figures or faces. As a
child, Darger witnessed a devastating tornado, and skies
with rolling clouds and electrical fireworks are often
present in his more turbulent scenes. I benign settings
the artist contrives rich and colorful patterns in
depictions of crowds of children, flowers and radiantly
colored insects.
One of the
most appealing and consistently rewarding aspects of
Darger’s art is his sumptuous feeling for color. His
richly orchestrated palette reinforces compositional
structure and provides treasures of felicitous and often
unexpected harmonies. Even in the most pale and subtle
combinations of hue, Darger establishes chromatic
relationships that are opulently atmospheric.
Darger’s
imagery, when it details mayhem and sometimes the lurid
mistreatment of little girls, can be distressing. An
observer characterized a picture in a sunny landscape in
which images of children, exotic flowers, butterflies
and exploding bombs were joined as “being like Beirut.”
The only possible response in such instances is that
art, being often fashioned from artists’ obsessions, is
rarely a vehicle for the description of perfection:
Darger created art from the visions available to him.
Viewers are
also perplexed by the clearly androgynous anatomy of
Darger’s nymphettes, curiously enough a trait never in
evidence among the seven angelic Vivian girls. It is
not possible to fathom the causes or intricacies of
Darger’s fantasies, but it should be said that his
public behavior appears to have been without blemish. A
saintly man who frequently attended Mass, Darger saw
himself as the ardent protector of children. He could,
therefore, in his words and images, subject his
creatures to terrible trials from which it was in his
power to rescue them. The wars, fires and tempests that
form the context of his art undoubtedly reflect an
unconscious conflict that seems to have given him little
respite. God was Darger’s protagonist and consequently
the conflict could be nothing less than cosmic. This
poignant struggle is extensively documented in the
artist’s diaries, which record by turns his pleading and
rancorous exchanges with the Creator. If Darger’s
fantasies often hovered on the fringes of sanity, his
art enabled him to transform his obsessions into a
luminous production that, in its best moments,
transcends the pain and circumstances of its making.
-from A Personal
Recollection by Nathan Lerner
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