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Thank heaven for little girls
Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Richard Vine
To illustrate his epic tale of young princesses in peril, the solitary -- and artistically self-taught -- Henry Darger created hundreds of collaged watercolors. A traveling show now reveals the techniques he used to convey an internal "civil war" that could find resolution only in religious grace.
There are moments when one could almost subscribe to the myth of lunatic genius. To enter Henry Darger's first retrospective, "The Unreality of Being," a traveling show of 63 paintings and drawings recently on view at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, was to sink into an imaginative world of stunning (though completely unschooled) technical virtuosity and utterly persuasive (though arguably perverse) mythopoeic power. These works on paper ranged from single-sheet portraits of fictive generals and half-human dragons to horizontal panoramas, up to 9 1/4 feet in length, that depict pretty, often naked, young girls alternately at play in idyllic landscapes or fleeing from horrific thunderstorms, forest fires and, most ominously, armies of malicious men. Some of the works, painted on both sides and scroll-like in their multiplicity of scenes and allover activation of shallow space, were displayed in upright double-exposure vitrines; others, showing what organizers consider their better side, were hung on the gallery walls one above the other to the height of 12 feet. The effect, reinforced by Darger's narrative compaction and glowing watercolor harmonies, was that of an Early Renaissance chapel.
The classic precedent for this work, however, is not the frescoes of Giotto or Piero della Francesca, but the half-mad illustrated epics of William Blake. For Darger, verbally prolific to an almost unimaginable degree, shared with the proto-Romantic poet a capacity for do-it-yourself production of arresting graphic images -- and likewise created whole worlds from a combination of conventional piety and idiosyncratic obsession.
Moreover, a Blakean dialectic between innocence and experience pervades all of Darger's literary-pictorial output. The temptation for even a psychoanalytic skeptic to read these scenes as displaced personal drama is virtually irresistible. Darger's images disconcert not just because he sentimentalizes childhood purity to a degree scarcely conceivable in the 20th century but also because he externalizes evil in a way that is distinctly premodern. This titanic Manichean struggle, these armies of dark and light -- are they a denial of or a metaphor for contending forces within? Even if Darger's pictures were not as strange and gorgeous as they are, his hallucinatory writings and tragic life-history might well hold sympathizers in thrall -- despite a queasy suspicion that this gifted recluse may have been, in sensibility if not in documented fact, a pedophile.
Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. His father, of German ancestry, worked as a tailor; his mother, originally from Wisconsin, died at the age of 35 (as Henry was about to turn four) from an infection occasioned by the birth of a baby girl. In his 5,084-page handwritten autobiography, The Story of My Life, Darger claims to have had no memory of his mother or his lost sister, who, nameless to him, was immediately surrendered for adoption. For the next four years, he lived contentedly with his 50-ish, partially lame father in a two-room apartment. At eight, with his father's health deteriorating, he was sent to five at a Catholic boys' home called the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, while continuing to attend classes in a public school. Despite his good scholastic performance, including active debates with a teacher over Civil War casualty figures, the young Darger behaved in a curious manner and made odd, disruptive noises with his nose, mouth and throat. His fellow students nicknamed him "Crazy," a moniker that stuck for the rest of his life. After undergoing several consultations with doctors, he was consigned to the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, an institution which at the time (ca. 1900-02) housed approximately 1,500 children, many of them profoundly retarded. His father died in 1905, when Darger was 13. Throughout his adolescence, the boy (who considered himself ill-used by supervising nuns) made several unsuccessful attempts at escape, but it was not until 1909 that the 17-year-old was able to negotiate the 150 miles from Lincoln, Ill., back to Chicago, where he began an independent life as a dishwasher and janitor at Saint Joseph's and other area hospitals.
Never married, the 5-foot-3-inch Darger seems to have had only one close friend, William Schloder, with whom he formed the nonfunctional, two-member Children's Protective Society. (In 1929, Darger expressed genuine bafflement when his offer to adopt a child was turned down by authorities.) He arose before 7:00 and attended Catholic mass regularly-sometimes four or five times a day. Twice, to his exasperation, he was rejected from military service: in 1918 for poor eyesight, in 1945 for age. Though reluctant to engage in conversation, except about the weather (a lifelong preoccupation), he was nevertheless a superb mimic who was sometimes heard to carry on long dialogues in which he played both himself and a cranky nun. From time to time, he was visited by a priest. He kept detailed weather journals in which he impatiently pointed out the errors of forecasters. (On Easter Sunday of 1913, the year he turned 21, Darger watched a tornado devastate the town of Countybrown, Ill.) Other notebooks were devoted to images and written accounts of lethal fires. Occasionally he sang songs with indecipherable lyrics, perhaps in accord with his claim to Brazilian birth. He wore old eyeglasses held together with tape and kept his wallet tied to a shoestring that attached to one belt loop. His wardrobe consisted primarily of shirts with torn-off sleeves for summer, a full-length army overcoat and a cap with ear-flaps for winter. Long a dedicated scavenger (sometimes from neighborhood trash cans), he accumulated large collections of twine, eyeglasses, toys, religious pictures and statuettes, Pepto-Bismol bottles, phonograph records and shoes.
