Darger's Outsider Art

Or Insider Art being expressed outwardly.

I’ve always admired artists that worked on their craft without looking for acknowledgement.  I may love or not love the artwork, but I appreciate the drive to create their art in an obsessive way.  A good example is someone like Vincent Van Gogh.  He devoted his last ten years of his life to his art.  Out of 21,000 works he sold around 20 while he was still up right.  It’s worth noting that his brother, Theo, supported him through his lifetime financially.  

The label could apply to me as I have finally latched on to a comic book concept that I really enjoy.  I’ve just finished my first comic book for “Ayahuasca, Wisconsin”, and the first story, “American as Football”.

As I obsessively worked to finish it up several things have been neglected.  We’re in gardening season now.  My tulips and peonies have passed on, but I haven’t gotten to my vegetable garden.  Housework has suffered too though with the amount of dust that has gathered on the furniture I may be able to throw seed down and grow a garden in my living room.  

The other day while I was working on the comic book I thought about Henry Darger, Jr..  Most people have no idea who he was, which is understandable.  He was considered part of the “Outsider Art” movement, which means that these were artists who were self-trained and not trained in the traditional arts.  

In Darger’s case his art was not discovered until after he died in 1973 at the age of 81. He had been hospitalized when his art was discovered in his small studio apartment by his landlords. Pages and pages of basically a comic book story dealing with the Vivian Girls and “In the Realms of the Unreal”.  He left behind over 15,000 pages of art.

He was born in 1892 and basically spent his entire life within the Chicago are.  There were many sad parts in his life such as his mother dying when he was four while giving birth to a sister that he never knew.  His father was a tailor and had health disabilities, which later caused him to be institutionalized.  Henry was institutionalized too finding himself being moved up grades because of his intellect, though doctors labeled him with having a heart that wasn’t in the right place.  

His early years were spent mistrusting adults, which lead to his acting out and later being sent to the Illinois Asylum for the Feeble-Minded.   He attempted several escapes after his father died in 1908, in which at some point he succeeded and left for Chicago.  

It was his godmother that helped Darger find menial jobs within Catholic hospitals that he held until his retirement in 1963.  He had a short stint in the U.S. Army during WWI.  He was a devout Catholic and was obsessed with the protection of children.  The Children’s Protective Society was founded with his friend, William Schloeder, that was meant to put adoptive children in good homes.   The two men were close friends for 48 years before Schloeder died in 1959.

Schloeder left Chicago sometime in the 1930s, which left Darger alone and drove him into his reclusiveness.  He carried on in janitorial work throughout his life.  He was a frugal man and spent much of his time finding discarded objects and mending his own clothes.  

Probably driven by his loneliness after his close friend left.  He lived exclusively in a room on Chicago’s northside for 43 years.  The kidnap and murder of a Chicago four-year-old, Elsie Paroubek, in 1911 became an obsession for him and most likely was the inspiration behind his stories.

Darger’s artwork consists of the stories following seven princesses called the Vivian girls, who lead a rebellion war against child enslavement relying on Christianity in his story telling.  Beyond the text he inserts images of the princesses and their rebellion, which in some scenes can be pretty gruesome.   Darger was not a trained artist, so his compositions relied heavily on collage, manipulating images, tracing and watercolor.  

The human imagination can be so amazing when it’s pursued and documented like in the case of Henry Darger, Jr. and others.  Possibly it’s a way to deal with a scary world that a person has no control over or feel part of, so a person explores an alternative that leads to creating art.  

There are collections of his work permanently found in the Museum of Art, American Folk Art Museums in New York City and the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago where they have on display a recreation of Darger’s small apartment.