Henry Darger
Random web searches can lead you to strange places sometimes. Several weeks ago I stumbled onto the Henry Darger story while doing some aimless web surfing, and I have just not been able to shake this guy. His story is amazing. And inspiring. And sad.
In 1973 Henry Darger, an impoverished 81 year old retired janitor, died in a Chicago Catholic poorhouse, alone, with no family or friends. Just prior to his death, his landlords went into the 2nd floor walk-up apartment he’d lived in for 40 years, and discovered an incredible artistic and literary treasure. Crammed into the tiny one-room apartment were hundreds of watercolor paintings, dozens of notebooks filled with meticulous observations of the weather, piles of newspaper and magazine clippings, and a 15000 page novel that detailed a monumental battle between the forces of good and evil on a distant planet. This discovery has had scholars scratching their heads for the last 30 years.
Darger was an uneducated man with little formal schooling and no artistic training. In spite of his artistic and literary shortcomings, he created a bizarre and strangely beautiful tale of 7 sisters who led a rebellion against an evil empire bent on enslaving and killing children. He illustrated the story with hundreds of watercolor paintings that depicted a fantastic landscape in which incredibly savage, years-long battles took place. Darger accomplished this by tracing cartoons, comic books, newspaper ads and anything else that was available. His unusual use of color, along with the fantastic imagery he employed, has made his work one the most important artistic finds of the last half century.
Darger spent 61 years creating this fantasy world. No one in the tenement he lived in for most of his adult life had any idea of what he was doing in his room. The few people in the neighborhood who noticed him at all thought he was a strange old hermit who walked around rummaging in the trash and talking to himself.
Henry Darger had no family, no friends, no confidants. His life consisted only of his work as a janitor and the imaginary world he created. After his workday was done, he would retreat to his cluttered little apartment where he spent every night alone, painting and writing and talking to himself. Perhaps the most fantastic part of Darger’s story is that he created this tremendous work only for himself, with no thought of publication. It is ironic that now, 30 years after his death, Henry Darger’s written works are being studied by a team of doctoral candidates, and his paintings are valued in the millions of dollars.
I think a lot about Darger. What fueled his creativity? Was it his loneliness, his isolation from other people? What kept him going year after year, when he knew he would never receive a dime from what he was doing? What would he think if he knew his life’s work was critically acclaimed as the most important example of “outsider art” ever found?