Henry Darger: Life and Works

JEAN-MARC SCANREIGH, FRANÇOISE BIVER

Five months before his death, an 80-year-old man learns that the secret enterprise of his life has been found out. “Throw it all away,” he says, convinced that what he has been doing in his room for 60 years will be judged as others already judge him, as “crazy.” These “people” include Nathan Lerner, an artist and professor at the Chicago Bauhaus who was nice enough not to evict him when he became his landlord in 1960. Henry Darger died in April 1973, a few days after Picasso, confounding the benevolence of his landlord with that of the Lord above, who finally stirred himself and accorded the old man an empathetic look and perhaps the sweet presentiment that Lerner wouldn’t throw anything away. Thus saved from destruction (1) was the raw prose of 15,145 typewritten sheets bound into 15 volumes, doubtless the longest work of fiction ever written, plus an appendix 10,531 pages long, six volumes of weather reports, time lines, a History of My Life—30,000 pages in all! Additionally, there were hundreds of drawings including three collections so enormous they are barely manageable, made of wide strips about three meters long and 70 centimeters wide, covered on both sides with watercolor drawings. This ensemble—indissociable from the place where it was “invented,” a small room stuffed with maniac collections, religious tracts and old prints—bears a title as strange as it is interminable: 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. Before delving any further into the story, the first viewers of Darger’s work must have been utterly dumbstruck by the drawings. Hordes of little girls, usually naked and adorned with penises, gambol in panoramic country scenes with a certain perverse naïve charm. This gaiety comes to a quick end when the reader discovers, hidden like Easter eggs, scenes of strangulation and evisceration. You realize that the children swarming against a background of spring gusts and fluttering butterflies are at the mercy of persecutors who are truly horrible despite their tin soldier airs.

Who Was Henry Darger?

Only the first 126 pages of his 5,084-page biography contain verifiable elements. The rest recount the ravages of an imaginary hurricane, a long digression that turns into an involuntary metaphor that says a great deal about his perception of the world and his mode of expression. Darger was four years old in 1896. His mother died after the birth of a sister who was soon adopted and disappeared from his life. He didn’t know her name or his mother’s, either. By 1900 he was a bizarre schoolchild, vaguely pyromaniac and violent. He was a good reader and writer, fascinated with Civil War history, but that didn’t prevent him from being wrongfully stuck in an orphanage and later placed in a home for the mentally retarded in Lincoln, Illinois. After the death of his father, who at any rate had been unable to deal with him, the 17-year-old Henry ran away and went back to his hometown Chicago where he found a job as a hospital handyman. He never had a family. He spent his life doing menial work, cleaning and washing up, always with the same nickname as in his childhood: “Crazy.” But he had a secret life. By day he worked in the hospital; by night he rebelled in the secrecy of his closed room where he invented his real life. Starting in 1911, drawing inspiration from the Bible and children’s literature, he began to devote his fabulous energy to the story of an imaginary universe just as complex as the real one. Despite his note cards, he got lost in the proliferation of repetitive scenes and characters with fluctuating identities. Despite his literary naivety, he was undeniably extremely inventive. Writing was an outlet that let him say it all, to live out all the roles, to intervene in his own intrigues like a demiurge. Slyly he even threw God off by putting his own personal pantheon up against Him: seven sublimely beautiful and invincible sisters, the Vivian Girls. The narrative of their heroic revolt would take 15,145 pages and 11 years of his life. These unshakable children sent out on missions of salvation again and again were the healing balm that helped him bear the pain of being severed from his family as a child and his social insignificance. Just like his invariable daily mass. Catholic worship, with its Virgin cajoling her male baby, offered just what he needed to console him for what he had lost, untangle the ambivalent feelings toward the sister who took his mother, and comfort him with the vision of an undifferentiated angelic childhood. Very likely Darger remained ignorant of sexual realities, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to adopt a child. In vain: You’re too crazy, Henry! “Asperger’s syndrome,” say psychological experts today, a kind of autism that leaves the intellectual faculties intact. Yet we are impressed by how “normal” he was: his flight from the asylum, his ability to main financial independence all his life (even during the Depression he didn’t lose his job!). As an artist he was equally surprising. He made use of modernity, typed up his handwritten pages and had photo enlargements done by professional photo labs. Realizing that the naked girls he gave them to enlarge might be shocking, he drew provisional panties on them. He was equally lucid about himself. He learned to get around his own weaknesses in anatomic drawing and was conscious enough of the fictional character of his writing that he resolutely situated the story in the “realms of the Unreal.” Like many others, he posed himself the eminently reasonable question of how God could remain silent in the face of the atrocities of wars and the murder of children. Gifted with a personal solidity that let him withstand alienation and solitude, he had nothing left but trashcans in which to stash the century. Holed up, believing that he was acting under the eye of God, he ceaselessly responded to the trashcans. What he did says a lot to us. Here we will yield to the temptation to make a slightly extravagant commentary just because the story of Darger’s creative destiny invites us to do so. 1912: Darger is furious because he can’t find a favorite photo of a little girl murdered in Chicago the year before. This image, a morbid echo of his missing sister, would haunt all his writing and drawings. As a reprisal against divine inertia, Darger throws himself into a description of the killing of 56,789 children butchered like cattle. This transgressive gesture—the kind that art is able to exteriorize and uphold—never left his room. Just the opposite of the subversive European who left the Old World behind to inflame visitors to the New York Armory Show with a rather inoffensive nude, one might be tempted to say. If Darger never heard that piece of news, nevertheless he seems to have been on the same wavelength that from Chicago to Paris exhorted artists to reappropriate bottle racks from a department store and pick up readymades the big city no longer wanted.

Yes I Am

1914: The year of the world war Darger so well described in his pages. This one involved the countries of the Real. Reading American and German newspapers—Darger was the son of German immigrants—brought back to him the impact of Civil War photos, the first of their kind, with those of the Crimean War, to reveal mangled corpses, the previously unshown side of war. It’s difficult not to think of another lonely man with a double life, busy during these same troubled times writing improbable but all too plausible stories, which a more educated Darger would have undoubtedly understood, if, of course, the author had happened to live in Chicago instead of Prague and wanted to throw into some trashcan a draft of In the Penal Colony. 1924: Once again, we’ll get fancy here. The signatories of the Surrealist Manifesto would surely have approved of Darger, but what would they have made, if somehow it had come to their attention, of the strange convergences between his biography and that of an obscure alter ego three years his elder who was to give his inner demons a “surreal” existence? From an impoverished family, tormented by artistic urges, living off odd jobs and often sleeping in the asylum at night, losing his father in late adolescence, excused from military service because of a weak constitution, crippled when it came to women and finally experiencing a sort of epiphany in his fantasies of total war, this man, unlike Darger, finally turned his dreams into reality. At the end of the First World War, living reclusively by his own wits, he brought forth a “Glandelinian” manual for the war to come: Mein Kampf. Darger was just a fiction writer whose inventions required nothing but images. He began making collages and photomontages that couldn’t have been closer to Schwitters’ stipulations for his merz—except that there was nothing oppositional about Darger’s. But the latter, failing to succeed at the dominant aesthetics, learned, like his fellow artists, to make positive and emancipated use of discards found in trash cans. 1929. Darger is 37. The stock marked crash is the backdrop for the appearance of a comic strip character who touched him in his soul: Little Orphan Annie. In fact, for many years there were two rival Annies competing in the daily press. They became the archetypes for his own world. He traced them and used them along with other characters he found in advertising calendars, catalogues, children’s clothing magazines and coloring books. The 1920s saw a flourishing of American picture magazines and pinups were everywhere. Darger, who feasted on images and obviously avoided these scantily-dressed women with exaggerated proportions, nevertheless got the general message about undressing. He was so taken by the famous 1953 striptease Coppertone ad showing a black cocker spaniel pulling down a little girl’s pants—a budding pinup to be sure—that he accumulated 20 copies. 1945: From one war to another Darger allowed himself to give in to his sadistic impulses, even though he was incapable of recognizing them as his own. Almost 30 years went by between the beginning of the writing of the Realms and the large-format drawings period. The early impulsiveness of his writing gave way to skillful and methodically worked out drawing. In this work, Darger obliviously explored his own concentration camps whose resemblance to historical atrocities is highly disturbing. The crucifixion scene, hallucinatory in its cruelty, in the drawing They are almost murdered themselves though they fight for their lives Typhoon saves them is one of the most outstanding versions ever of the Massacre of the Innocents theme. During the 1940s he had 246 blowups made at the corner drugstore, a step forward that was not doubt financially calamitous. His discovery of a method he learned from no one else made it possible for him to do large panoramic compositions—so long that he couldn’t unroll them entirely—with extraordinary skies, sometimes heavy with Hiroshima nightmare overtones. With an obvious sense of space and perspective, he worked with the scale of his characters, cloning them like a Cecil B. De Mille with his extras, and worked miracles with his poor schoolboy’s materials. 1950s and 60s: His drawing are less and less illustrative of his writing. They mark an idyllic sort of “post” period filled with self-possessed and repetitive little girls in polka-dot dresses and the horns and tails of Chinese New Year, bizzareries that knock us out today. Horror continues to be present, but almost as if accidentally. This rather rare visual oxymoron is nevertheless very much a part of contemporary Japanese art, with its unique mixtures of kawai (cute) and just the right amount of abomination, as in Chiho Aoshima’s bloody schoolgirls at gigantic fun fairs exploding with digital coloring. A fine revival of Pop Art, a movement that in his time Darger, great collector of printed mater that he was, with his tracing and his Kodak blowups, also became a part of in his own way. Even if he mechanically kicked his pile of empty Pepto Bismol bottles while Andy became feverish at the sight of his pile of Campbell’s cans, Darger was not unlike him and the others in his use of ironic distancing and his Quaker Oats-style paintings within paintings within paintings and ambiguous statue-like stranglers. In what has been excerpted from his writing he mentions a museum only once. Probably he never set foot inside. “But are you an artist?” he heard himself asked when he was at death’s door, and he replied, murmuring, “Yes, I am.” Of course today he is known under the label of “outsider art.” His drawings were shown starting in 1977 at the Hyde Park Center in Chicago and in 1979 in London. Today, most of his work is kept at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which also has a major Darger studies center. The Milwaukee art museum, the Chicago Art Institute, museums in Washington and Minneapolis all hold some of his work. Fifteen large- format pieces, most of them two-sided, have been given to the Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, where they are part of the permanent collection. Darger’s room, kept more or less intact, has been dismantled and reinstalled at the Inutit, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in the windy city.

An Art Brut Refugee

Of course Darger was obsessive but his creativity was distinct from the usual compulsiveness of outsider art. He developed, acquiring skills one after another, with a certain ability to self-criticize and awareness of the exterior context. He constantly thought through and experimented with artistic techniques. Michel Thévoz notes that art brut had to be defined by an exaggerated emphasis on its isolation from its cultural context. In terms of Darger, perhaps it would be more relevant to see him as indifferent to the dominant culture while seeking to appropriate its techniques. Obviously this kind of criteria could be applied to many contemporary artists. Even when talking about the irony of those recognized as “legitimately” ironic, as Thévoz says, there is an interference between operational modes that cries out for comparison. This challenge was taken up by New York’s PS1, which presented Darger between Goya and the brothers Jake & Dinos Chapman in Disasters of War (winter 2000-2001). Darger could have found a place in France during the same period, in shows like Présumé innocent (CAPCMusée, Bordeaux) and Jean-Hubert Martin’s Partage d’exotismes (Biennale de Lyon, 2000). But his only show in France took place in 1998 in an exhibition of American outsider art at the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris. Although the first reference book on Darger was written in French, he is not known in France. In other countries his work is hot, appearing in Nathalie Merchant’s rock music, John Ashberry’s poetry, theater, video games and on the Net, of course. It is said people have bought the film rights, and the market has set the value of his drawings at six figures. It’s hard to know how much the Darger craze is inspired by his florid delirium and how much by the frankly disturbing quality of his work. He has been decried as a sadistic pedophile—a 1990 traveling exhibition sponsored by the American Federation of Art was cancelled. Darger was suave, shameless, really no “brute” at all. We would do best to consider him the ordinary offspring of the 20th century’s artistic turmoil. Once again, we note his strange and “decompartmentalizing” closeness to Duchamp, especially the posthumous Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. Let’s take another look. Does this last installation Duchamp left us—a woman raped or asleep—have something in common with the iconic image of Darger’s little murder victim? Let’s imagine that Duchamp had brought her back as an adult and placed her in a pastoral landscape, naked , with her head and feet cut off. While Darger eludes the question of the feet—his nude keeps her socks on—Duchamp’s elision of the head reads like censorship. What the cut-out in the wall of Duchamp’s piece hides from our view are of course the strangled woman’s bulging eyes and protruding tongue. The arms that in Darger’s work sometimes enter into the drawing as a close-up to squeeze the victim’s neck are no different from the ones that Duchamp withdrew after parting her thighs…to reveal her mystifying genitals. The groin in Given is smooth and watertight. There is the same denial of penetration, and of parturition as in the realm of the Vivian Girls, obturated with a penis. An erotic diversion. What the bachelors of The Large Glass try to strip naked with their x-ray vision, the Chicago soliloquist, doomed to masturbation, read in anatomical cross- sections of human bodies found by chance. In Darger’s drawings the aim of disemboweling was to find out what was what; oozing with blood, he threw the entrails before God for fodder just as you rub a dog’s nose in its shit. We don’t know what the explorer Duchamp did with the entrails; he gave viewers his mummy all smoothed out, neatly sewn up as if by a taxidermist. A more presentable Darger, you could say, but with self-proclaimed limits. But by putting an old wall between the woman and her viewers, in forcing them to see her through keyholes, Given strangely resembles a Dargerian experience. The creative anonymity Duchamp was able to demand for himself poses the question of the deferred in art, the importance of a stasis in his last work. The secret 20-year gestation of Given let Duchamp regress to Darger’s loaded realism, from the champ (field) to the ancient peat underneath (in German, Darger means peat cutter). And Darger, necessarily upping the ante, makes us see it all from where he has withdrawn, in his heart of hearts, through the duration of time and sedimentation. As if we should be deeply suspicious of art that is not nourished by these substrata that only time and retention can guarantee.

Translation, L-S Torgoff

(1) Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, trustees of the Darger “estate,” have sought to make it accessible to researchers. The most persevering of them has been John MacGregor, who spent 11 years of his life studying this “case.” A book of some 700 abundantly illustrated pages was published in English by the New York firm Delano Greenidge in 2002

Jean-Marc Scanreigh is an artist and teaches at the Nîmes fine arts school. Françoise Biver works with him on artist’s books and critical texts.