Henry Joseph Darger Jr. ( ; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American janitor and hospital worker. He gained recognition only after his death for his vast body of visual art and writing.

Darger was raised by his disabled father in Chicago. Frequently in fights, he was put into a charity home as his father's health declined, and in 1904 was sent to the then-named Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, officially due to his masturbation. He began making escape attempts after his father's death in 1908, and in 1910 was able to escape, walking much of the way to Chicago. As an adult he did menial jobs for several hospitals, interrupted by a brief stint in the United States Army during World War I. He spent much of his life in poverty and in later life was a recluse in his apartment. A devout Catholic, Darger attended Mass multiple times each day and collected religious memorabilia. Retiring in 1963 due to chronic pain, he was moved into a charity nursing home in late 1972, shortly before his death. During this move, his landlords Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork and writings, which he had created and kept secret over the course of decades.

From around the early 1910s to the late 1930s, Darger wrote the 15,145-page novel In the Realms of the Unreal, centered on a rebellion of child slaves on a fantastical planet. The chief protagonists are the Vivian Girls, who fight to free the children from the enslaving Glandelinians. Inspired by the American Civil War and martyrdom stories, it features lengthy, gruesome descriptions of battles, many ending with the mass killing of rebel children. Between 1912 and 1925, Darger produced collages, often only loosely correlated to the book. Later he made these with watercolors and traced figures taken from popular sources such as magazines and children's books. These paintings grew more elaborate over time, with some of his largest works exceeding in length. Little girls, often in combat, are a primary focus; for unknown reasons, they are frequently depicted naked and exclusively with male genitalia. Other writings by Darger include a roughly 8,000-page unfinished sequel to In the Realms of the Unreal entitled Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, a decade-long daily weather journal, and The History of My Life—consisting of a 206-page autobiography followed by several thousand pages about the destruction caused by a fictional Illinois tornado.

Darger made no efforts to publish his work, and it was unknown to others until shortly before his death. He is frequently associated with the outsider art movement, which encompasses the work of self-taught creators outside the mainstream art community who frequently produce very singular and unusual work. His art was popularized by his former landlords and is now featured in many museum collections, with the largest at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and the Intuit Art Museum in Chicago. Initial critical analysis of him and his work took a psychoanalytical approach, often focused on his many depictions of nude and brutalized children. Scholars have hypothesized several different psychological conditions Darger may have suffered from. Theories from earlier scholars that he was a pedophile or murderer have been discredited.

Biography

Childhood

Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was born on April 12, 1892, in Chicago, Illinois, to Rosa () and Henry Darger. His father was a German immigrant born in Meldorf, who (despite physical disability) worked as a tailor. Rosa, from Wisconsin, was a housewife. Later in life, the younger Darger frequently claimed that he was a Brazilian born in São Paulo with the surname Dagarius, although there is no evidence of this. In April 1895, his mother died of an infection shortly after giving birth to his sister. His sister was put up for adoption; Darger recounted that he had never seen her or known her name. Darger remained in the care of his father, who he later recalled as a "kind and easy-going man". Darger described initially hating children younger than him and bullying them, which he retrospectively attributed to a lack of siblings; however, he wrote that he grew deeply fond of children later in life.

Darger attended grade school at Catholic schools. According to his later writings, he was able to transfer directly from first grade to third grade due to his ability to read. Relatively isolated, he often engaged in physical fights with teachers and other children when about seven or eight years old. Once, he allegedly slashed a teacher's arms and face with a knife. At some point, his poor behavior resulted in legal trouble, and he was moved to a "certain boys' home" in Morton Grove, Illinois, but his father brought him home after only a short stay.

When Darger was eight years old, around 1900, his father's physical health declined further, and he became unable to work or take care of his son. Darger's uncles paid for his father to be put into a Catholic poorhouse, while Darger was baptized and put in the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, a church-run home for homeless and orphaned boys. As the home was far away from any of the city's Catholic schools, Darger began attending public elementary school. The mission was locally nicknamed the "News Boys' Home" due to its practice of having its residents sell newspapers to pay for their stay.

Institutionalization

Darger disliked the boys' home and fantasized about running away. His father visited him occasionally, and at one point attempted to have one of his relatives adopt him. Darger was successful academically but alienated his peers through what he described as "strange noises with my mouth, nose, and throat" and repetitive motions with his hand. His vocalizations had him briefly expelled from his elementary school, but he was readmitted with the support of his home's director. Despite his readmission, his caretakers seem to have viewed him as "feeble-minded" or insane. After a clinical examination in November 1904, Darger was institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. During the early 20th century, children in such facilities were expected to remain in the asylum system for life. An intake form prepared by a physician and his father described him as mentally deficient purely due to his "self-abuse" (masturbation), which was marked as having begun around age six.alt=A colored postcard showing a large complex of brick buildings behind a large grassy pavilion|thumb|Postcard showing the boys' housing at the Lincoln Asylum, During Darger's time in the Lincoln Asylum, it had a population of about 1,200 children and a staff of over 500. The institution was marked by allegations of severe negligence and abuse toward its children, including one child who died from burns while unattended in a bathtub. Darger was grouped into the higher functioning category of children at the asylum and made to attend school. Although he occasionally suffered physical punishments for misbehavior, he reported that he eventually "got to like the place", noting various friends he made there. When he was about thirteen, he began to be dispatched every summer with around 50 boys to a state-owned farm (often called the State Farm) a short distance from the institution. They were tasked with farm work six days a week. Darger recounted that he enjoyed the work at the farm but disliked being away from the asylum, which he viewed as his home.

Darger was greatly affected by the news of his father's death on March 1, 1908. He reported being in a state of mourning for several months after, spending all of his time alone "in a state of ugliness of such nature that everyone avoided me". He was so uncomfortable with being relocated to the State Farm during the summer that he tried to run away. After a brief failed attempt to run away from the farm in June, he was able to escape by freighthopping with another boy from the asylum and return to Chicago. Shortly afterwards, he was caught in a storm and turned himself in to the police, who brought him back to the asylum. After another brief attempt the following year, he made his fourth and final attempt to escape in 1910. Darger and two other boys from the institution ran away from the State Farm and found work with a German farmer. When he no longer needed the boys as workers, they rode the Illinois Central Railroad to Decatur, Illinois. Darger decided to walk the roughly from Decatur back to Chicago, often at night due to hot weather and difficulties sleeping.

Career and adulthood

Arriving in Chicago in August 1910, Darger stayed with his godmother, who helped him find work as a janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital, a Catholic hospital operated by the Sisters of Charity. He was tasked with cleaning both the hospital itself and the attached residences of its nuns. Darger was frequently mocked by the hospital's nuns (his supervisors) who believed he was insane. He recounted in his memoirs being unable to take time off when ill and being threatened with institutionalization by one of his supervisors. Around this time, he began writing fiction in his journals. He may have also made his first pieces of visual art (initially collages) alongside this, or a few years afterwards. Having no experience in bookbinding, Darger improvised using materials such as glue, cardboard, newspaper, and rags. He used a variety of paper sizes, colors, and thicknesses as typing papers, resulting in greatly uneven pages. He also reused flyers and notebooks (most likely taken from the trash) which at times still bear their previous unrelated text. Only the first seven volumes of In the Realms of the Unreal were bound, with the remaining seven or eight volumes found as unbound bundles of loose papers. Darger's frequent reshuffling of portions of the work and a lack of clear continuity in many parts lead to only a loose, tentative order of volumes later reconstructed by scholars. A handful of his illustrations relate to Further Adventures in Chicago, including a depiction of Glandelinian soldiers in downtown Chicago and a portrait of the Vivian Girls floating in the air nude, encircling the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

upright=1.5|alt=A painting showing a battle scene. A group of young girls, mainly nude, are fighting a pitched battle in a colorful forest scene, with a lightning storm behind them. Some of the girls lie dying on the ground.|left|thumb|Untitled painting by Darger, showing a group of primarily naked girls in combat during a thunderstorm

Although Darger had enjoyed drawing and painting since his childhood, he seems to have abandoned it for some time in favor of writing. His first illustrations for In the Realms of the Unreal date to some point between 1912 and 1925, and were hung on the wall of his boarding house room. The earliest pictures were made to depict characters from the book, consisting of overpainted photographs and illustrations mounted on cardboard. The earliest depiction of the Vivian Girls was made during this period, consisting of eight overpainted pictures mounted on a piece of cardboard alongside typed descriptions.

In the decades following his death, Darger became popular with enthusiasts and scholars of outsider art (also known as ), a movement which celebrates art by self-trained creators from outside the professional art world, often including those with mental disabilities. MacGregor described him as "the single most important example of American outsider art in existence". Such a field did not exist as an appreciable field of art discourse in the United States until the 1960s and 1970s; Trent noted that it would have been very unlikely for his art to find popularity in American art communities for most of his life, especially due to American fears of sexual deviance during much of the 20th century. Whether Darger can be described as an outsider artist is a matter of scholarly debate. His incorporation of pop culture diverges from stricter definitions of outsider art, such as those promoted by painter Jean Dubuffet, which emphasize the eschewment of mainstream culture. Art critics such as Arthur Danto and Robert Hughes praised Darger's work.

Darger's writings are less well-known than his illustrations. They have never been published beyond brief excerpts, and their enormous length and idiosyncratic style have deterred extensive literary analysis. As of 2015, a project existed to publish a 1,500-page excerpt from The Realms of the Unreal.

Auction prices for Darger's work rose steadily after his discovery due to the growing popularity of outsider art. In 1989, one of his watercolors auctioned for 50,000 franc (), while a larger panorama reached 500,000 euro () in 2014.

In 2001, the singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant released a song about Darger titled Henry Darger on her album Motherland. Darger was the subject of a 2004 documentary by Jessica Yu entitled In the Realms of the Unreal, which features interviews with his neighbors and Kiyoko Lerner. His work has influenced artists such as the sculptor Grayson Perry (who described him as his favorite artist), the fashion designer Anna Sui, and the poet John Ashbery, whose poem Girls on the Run was directly inspired by Darger. Some of multimedia artist Paul Chan's early works are directly based on Darger, including a 2003 animated piece projected onto a long panorama, intended as a modern interpretation of the work of Darger and utopian Charles Fourier.

During his last year, Darger is alleged to have made unclear and inconsistent statements regarding the status of his work. Berglund claimed Darger told him to throw away all the paintings and manuscripts while he was helping him move. In contrast, when Lerner later visited him at the nursing home and asked about his works, he is alleged to have said "it's all yours, please keep it." He is also reported to have told a fellow patient at the facility that he was giving his property to the Lerners. Darger's mental health deteriorated in his old age, and he reportedly struggled to recognize Lerner. In addition to the contradictory instructions on what to do with the material, it is unclear whether he was referring to the loose papers and notebooks in his apartments, the bound volumes, or both. He had no known will, most likely dying intestate. Under the Illinois probate code, his estate would have automatically transferred to the closest living heir; he had a number of living relatives through the descendants of his cousin Annie, but they were not tracked down and contacted after his death. His relatives may have been uninterested in a claim even if they were aware of his death, as the estate would have been judged to have little to no value. In this case, ownership would have been passed to Cook County or the state government of Illinois.

None of Darger's works had been registered with the United States Copyright Office by the time of his death. In 1995, the copyright of Darger's work was claimed by Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner. Since Nathan's death in 1997, it has been claimed by Kiyoko Lerner and managed by the Artists Rights Society, a licensing organization. Following a 2019 article in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property which called the Lerners' claim to the copyright into question, art collector Ron Slattery tracked down Darger's surviving relatives (mainly first cousins two or three times removed). A group of these relatives contested Lerner's ownership in a 2022 federal lawsuit.

Collections and exhibits

In 1977, four years after his death, the Lerners first exhibited Darger's art and writing (alongside his typewriter and some of his furniture) at the Hyde Park Art Center in southern Chicago. Another early exhibition was made the same year by the Chicago Surrealist Group in Gary, Indiana, where the surrealist poet Franklin Rosemont published the first-ever text written about Darger's work. In 1979, some of Darger's work was featured in an exhibition of outsider art at the Hayward Gallery in London. From 1996 to 1997, University of Iowa Museum of Art director Stephen Prokopoff organized a traveling exhibition of Darger's works, visiting New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and attracting significant national attention to his work.

thumb|Kiyoko Lerner donated 45 of Darger's illustrations to the [[Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.|alt=The exterior of the Palais de Tokyo of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, a large marble structure with a colonnade at center and wings on either side]]

The largest collection of Darger's works is held by the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York. Acquired in 2000, the AFAM collection contains the original manuscripts of all three of his major works, his weather report journal, a planning journal used to keep track of characters and events in In the Realms of the Unreal, more than sixty of his paintings and collages, and various sketches, source materials, and personal records. Inspired by the perspective of art historian and curator Klaus Biesenbach, Kiyoko Lerner has sought to promote Darger's art outside the context of outsider or folk art, withdrawing from representation deals from the Carl Hammer Gallery and Galerie St. Etienne (which highlighted self-taught artists) in 2006 in favor of the Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. The Lerners donated some of his pieces to various other museums, including the Collection de l'art brut (a Swiss museum specializing in outsider art), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2012–2013, Kiyoko donated forty-five pieces to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, possibly on the condition that the museum also display a collection of Nathan Lerner's photography. Acquired from this collection, the Centre Pompidou in Paris holds six of his painted panels. The Museum of Everything, a touring exhibition of self-taught and outsider artists, has frequently displayed Darger's work.

Kiyoko Lerner made microform copies of Darger's writings during the 1990s. A digitized version of these is hosted online by the Illinois State Library. A digitization of the bound volumes of In the Realms of the Unreal was done by the AFAM in 2020 as part of the Save America's Treasures program.

Notes

Citations

Works cited

Books

Articles

Collection catalogues and miscellanea

Further reading

  • Official website by Darger scholars
  • Digitized microform scans of Darger's writings