Thank heaven for little girls

In 1910, at the age of 18, this consummate Outsider had begun to compose -- first longhand, later (in 1912 or 1916) with the aid of a primitive manual typewriter (treated as an elevated, spotlit relic in the show) -- a fantasy epic that eventually filled 15,145 single-spaced, legal-size pages bound by hand into 15 volumes: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. By Darger's own account, composition of the young-girls-in-jeopardy story, with its attendant catalogues of flags, maps, officers, uniforms and battle casualties, took 11 years (thus requiring, by my calculation, an average production of 2,300 words per day, 365 days per year). The massive work, feverishly mixing idealization and sadism, is therefore a product of the celibate Darger's most sexually volatile years. Late in the process, he decided to illustrate the tale, mostly in three separate albums, eventually producing some 300 pictures, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels. This visual project occupied the remainder of his life -- he kept dutiful lists of illustrations needed, checking them off as each was completed -- while he continued to write voluminously: journals, the fire and weather logs, a novelistic sequel known as The Vivian Girls in Chicago (a haunted-house saga), and the immense and largely fanciful "autobiography" that he began after his retirement in 1963.

Probably none of this would be known to us save for the fact that in 1932 Darger moved into a single upper-story room at 851 Webster Street (now a virtual shrine, preserved as he left it), where he eventually became the tenant of Chicago photographer, designer, painter and Institute of Design professor Nathan Lerner. Here, Darger pursued his work in utter secret for another 40 years, while the room filled with his refuse "collections" and the popular-press sources of his appropriated imagery. newspaper and magazine clippings, coloring books, children's volumes (including a first edition of The Wizard of Oz) and comic strips especially "Little Orphan Annie" and "Little Annie Rooney"). This chamber contained no kitchen and was so cram-packed with trunks and debris that Darger is believed to have slept mostly in a reclining armchair. Due to the severely constricted living area, he may have found it impossible to unfold and view his longer compositions in their entirety. Nevertheless, Darger labored on until age and lameness prompted him to enter the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Elderly, where his father had spent his last days. After six months of progressive withdrawal into chin-on-chest stupor, Darger died alone there on Apr. 13, 1973. one day after his 81st birthday.

Most landlords would have immediately consigned Darger's fantasia to the trash, and indeed this was the fate of some ancillary notebooks and papers before the bound tomes of The Realms of the Unreal came to light. Once the pictures were found, Lerner (who died in 1997) and his wife, Kiyoko, were quick to recognize their artistic value and to publicize the Darger legacy. Daniel Luebbe catalogued and photographed all the work. The first public exhibition was held at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1977, and Darger's images have subsequently appeared at such major venues as Denmark's Louisiana Museum, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Whitney Museum and Chicago's MCA. As market interest grew and the cost of storage and deacidification mounted, some works were removed from their volumes and sold to collectors and dealers, but the Lerners, who eventually formed a foundation for the preservation of the material, recently gave 15 major works to the Collection de l'art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.