Henry Darger: Outsider Inside His Own World

Outsider artists often present a pathetic spectacle to the rest of the world: forgotten inmates of mental institutions, shuffling, muttering loners, or misfits, like Henry Darger, who spent his workdays doing low-paid janitorial work and spent his free time solitarily writing and illustrating an unpublishable 15,145-page novel about a vast imaginary planet where the evil nation of Glandelinia conducted cruel wars of enslavement against the good children of Angelinia. Some of the fruits of the lonely furrow he ploughed are now on display at the Hara Museum of Art.

Like many of his ilk, Darger, who was born in 1892, spent part of his life institutionalized and died in impoverished anonymity. He never benefited from artistic training, lacked confidence in his art, and never willingly showed it to anyone. His art was rescued from oblivion by his landlord Nathan Lerner, a commercial artist, who discovered it when Darger’s terminal illness forced him to move to a hospice in 1973.

These circumstances might suggest that the only reason his art is collected is because of a patronizing sense of pity. But, to an art world that craves originality, outsider art has one main advantage over art produced by artists connected to the art world – uniqueness.

Along with aesthetic merit and craftsmanship, uniqueness has always been part of the basic currency of art. This is because uniqueness invokes scarcity, and scarcity creates value in the sense that the rarer something is, the more expensive it becomes. With his smaller works selling for over $25,000, Darger's works have apparently acquired a reputation for being like nothing else.

Almost all the pictures and the theme of his epic, which goes by the catchy title of the "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 Rebelion," reveal Darger's obsessive interest in children. The heroines of the story are seven young sisters – the Vivian girls – who, when depicted naked appear to have penises.

"He was interested in the issue of child slavery because he wanted to depict and emphasize the maltreatment of children," Yoko Nakamura, a curator at the museum explains, slightly uncomfortable at the suggestion that a grown man, obsessively creating images of young children, many of them naked, has something of the 'otaku' about it. Perhaps this also explains his evident popularity in Japan, where there have been at least two earlier exhibitions of Darger's works.

"Westerners want to connect Henry Darger to otaku," Nakamura points out. "But basically Henry Darger's work is popular in Japan because our culture is open–minded."

Darger's methods derived from his lack of confidence. Rather than drawing his images freehand, most of them are assemblages of traced, collaged or photographically enlarged images from popular magazines, coloring books, and adverts that he then colored with watercolor paints. Only where he was unable to find an image he wanted did he venture on freehand drawing, as with his images of the Blengins, fabulous beasts – half-child and half-dragon – that protect the children in his story.

The fact that he 'quoted' or borrowed most of his lines and images from a limited source of images, gives his work a consistent and instantly recognizable style. It also means that, besides his imaginative vision, his main artistic input was his sense of color and composition.

Some of the works created, especially those featuring assemblages of young girls and flowers, have a sweet, overpowering charm that dispose you to believe the best about Darger. But alongside these examples of saccharine Surrealism are other works that hint at a darker side, scenes showing torture and brutal massacres of children. In our age of overprotective parenting, it is easy to see this as evidence that Darger was some sort of potential kiddy fiddler or murderer, who perhaps fortunately found a release for his dark impulses through his art.

Such an explanation seems inconsistent with the overall tone of his works, while in "The History of My Life," an autobiographical document that was found among his papers, Darger seems to emotionally identify as a child:

"Do you believe it, unlike most children, I hated to see the day come when I will be grown up. I never wanted to. I wished to be young always. I am a grownup now and old lame man, darn it."

The skill evident in Darger's work has led the exhibition's curators to contend that Darger was not in fact an outsider artist but just a normal outstanding creator. Such a suggestion is insidious both because it suggests that people with emotional or mental problems are lacking in talent and because it detracts from the naïve sincerity that is one of the chief charms of Darger's work. If Darger had been just a normal artist, then his pictures of flowers and girls, with the occasional atrocity, would be some great, pointless, ironic joke. It’s the lack of a punchline that makes these absurd paintings truly moving.

C.B.Liddell
The Japan Times
26th April, 2007