Henry Darger

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Henry Darger (born April 12, 1892 in Chicago , † April 13, 1973 ibid) was a reclusive American writer and artist who lived and worked as a caretaker in Chicago.

He became famous for the 15,145-page manuscript, which was discovered after his death and illustrated with several hundred drawings and watercolors, entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion . Darger's work became one of the most highly acclaimed of Outsider Art .

Life

Darger was probably born on April 12, 1892. When he was four years old, the mother died after giving birth to his sister, who was put up for adoption and whom he never met. Darger's biographer, art historian and psychologist John M. McGregor, found that Henry Darger had two older sisters, but nothing is known about their whereabouts.

According to Darger, his father was very loving and they lived together until 1900. Then his father, ill and impoverished, came to an old people's home and his son to a Catholic children's home. Darger senior died in 1905 and his son was hospitalized in Lincoln , Illinois because "little Henry's heart is out of place" (Stephen Prokopoff). By John MacGregor, the diagnosis was actually "self-abuse" (self-abuse), which AM Holmes as a euphemism for masturbation indicated. Darger himself felt that his problem was figuring out what adults' lies were, and as a result he became a know-it-all. He went through a lengthy phase in which he felt compelled to make strange noises, a variant of Tourette's syndrome .

The education measures in the children's home included hard work and severe punishment, which Darger processed in In the Realms of the Unreal . He later said that he had good times there and of course had friends as well as enemies. While there, he received news that his father had died.

A series of escape attempts ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he hitchhiked back to Chicago. On this trip he experienced a huge tornado that devastated southern Illinois. He describes this as “the unbelievable bloating of nature beyond human comprehension”. In Chicago he found work as a servant in a Catholic hospital and that was how he survived the next 50 years.

Aside from his brief service in the army, Darger's life was stereotyped and seemed to vary little: he attended mass up to five times a day; he was collecting and hoarding an incredible amount of trash from the street. His clothes were patched and worn, although he tried to keep them clean and neat. He was lonely and his only close friend, William Shloder, agreed with Darger on protecting abused and neglected children. The two intended to found a "child protection association", which should mediate such children for adoption. However, Shloder left Chicago in the mid-1930s.

In 1930 Darger moved to an apartment in northern Chicago. The apartment owners, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, discovered his artistic work shortly before his death on April 13, 1973, the day after his 81st birthday, in the same Catholic hospital in which his father had died. They looked after his estate, publicized his work, and contributed to projects such as the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal in 2004. Posthumously, Darger received international recognition.

The name Darger has become a household name in the world of Outsider Art . At the Outsider Art Fair, which takes place annually in New York City in January , and at auctions, his paintings are among the most highly paid. In 2001, the American Folk Art Museum in New York opened a "Henry Darger Study Center". The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago plans to restore Henry Darger's apartment.

In the Realms of the Unreal

Darger's work contains many religious subjects, but they are treated very idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal describes a large planet, with moons in orbit, which is mostly inhabited by Christians, especially Catholics.

Most of the story is about the adventures of Robert Vivian's seven daughters, who are princesses of the Abbiennia people. They support the dangerous uprising against the cruel, child enslavement, regime of John Manley imposed by the Glandelinians. The Glandelinians are like soldiers in the Confederate Army of the American Civil War. The children also take up arms to defend themselves and are often slain in combat or tortured in the most cruel manner by the Glandelinian leaders.

In the carefully elaborated myth there are also the "Blengigomeneans" or Blengins, winged beings with curved horns that occasionally take on human or human-like features. Usually they have a benevolent attitude towards the Vivian siblings.

The fictional war was sparked off by Darger's loss of a newspaper photo of Elsie Paroubek , who was strangled in 1911 at the age of five in Chicago and whose killer has never been found. In his autobiography, Darger assumes that this photo, along with numerous other items, was stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found this photo again, and when he found the picture in the newspaper archive of a public library, he was not allowed to copy it. Elsie Paroubek's photo inspired him to create the character of Annie Aronburg and ultimately prompted him to write In the Realms of the Unreal .

In the Realms of the Unreal , the assassination attempt on the child rebel Annie Aronbourg is portrayed as the most shocking child murder that the Glandelin government has ever been responsible for and which therefore sparked war. Through the sufferings of this war, the Vivian Girls hope to be able to achieve victory for Christianity. Darger planned two endings for the story. In one the Vivian Girls triumphed, in the other they were defeated and the godless Glandelinians took control.

Darger designed his human figures largely with the help of collages , photocopies, enlargements of photos from popular magazines or images from children's books. Material was provided by the old magazines and newspapers he had hoarded. Some of his favorite characters were the "Coppertone Girl" and "Little Annie Rooney". He is praised for his natural ability to compose and his sensitive use of colors in his watercolors.

The images of daring escapes, violent battles and painful torments are reminiscent of events in Catholic history. The text makes it clear that the child sacrifices are heroic martyrs, like the early saints .

A clear feature of Darger's artwork is his apparent ignorance of anything sexual. His figures, whether undressed or only partially clothed, often show no gender. Some female figures even occasionally have a penis .

Some voices suggest that Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy and that he viewed the female gender as a symbol of power. This is suggested by a detailed description in a chapter of In the Realms of the Unreal , according to which girls can be as successful as boys. Others believe that he painted girls after a picture of the child Jesus.

Darger's health

Darger gets a lot of attention for his portrayal of the appalling brutality towards children. It is sometimes assumed that Darger wrote and drawn this way because he was suppressing unconscious desires. Darger's biographer John M. MacGregor speculated whether Darger was possibly the culprit in Elsie Paroubek's death in 1911. MacGregor later defended his psychoanalytic view of Darger, but denied that he was accusing him of murder.

More literary work

The sequel to In the Realms of the Unreal is titled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago . Started in 1939, it is a Stephen King- like story about a house inhabited by demons and haunted spirits. Or maybe it has a similar terrible subconscious like the house in Shining . Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. "The Vivian Girls" and a male friend are entrusted with the investigation and discover that the murders are the work of cruel spirits. The girls drive the ghosts out of every single room until the house is cleaned.

In 1968, Darger became interested in researching his frustrations back into his childhood. It was the year he wrote The History of my Life , a 206-page book that detailed his early life before it changed into the 4,672-page story of a giant tornado called "Sweetie Pie", possibly on the basis of memories of a tornado he'd experienced decades earlier. He also kept a diary of weather observations and his daily activities.

Darger often dealt with the plight of abused and neglected children. The children's home where he lived was put under surveillance shortly before he left after a major scandal. It is also possible that he saw victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked.

Darger in modern art

Since his death in 1973 and after the discovery of his extensive work, there have been numerous references to his work, especially since the 1990s and especially in the field of music.

One of the earliest reception was in 1979 by "Snakefinger" Philip Lithman Roth . Other examples are Camper van Beethoven's Monks of Doom on The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, 1989; Natalie Merchant on Motherland, 2001; From Autumn to Ashes on "Abandon Your Friends", 2005; Fucked Up on "Hidden World", 2006; Sufjan Stevens on "The Avalanche", 2006 and Dead Low Tide on "Dead Low Tide".

The band The Vivian Girls took their name directly from Henry Darger and otherwise refers to his work.

There are references in literature to Darger in the book of poems Girls on the Run by John Ashbery . Neil Gaiman also refers to him in his story “Going inside”. In this story, delirium is prevented by five mentally disabled people and their watchdog from penetrating too deeply into their own psyche. One of these people, an old man, is writing and drawing in the loneliness of his house on a comprehensive manuscript, which is strongly reminiscent of Darger and his work. The reference, however, should be justified more emotionally than objectively, for example where the man punishes himself if he has written too few pages a day.

In 2004, the choreographer Pat Graney put on his multimedia performance The Vivian Girls . Jessica Yu made a film documentary from the same year.

Web links

literature

  • Anderson, Brooke Davis. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum . New York: American Folk Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001. ISBN 0-8109-1398-4
  • John Ashbery: '' Girls on the run ''. - Munich, Hanser, 2002. ISBN 3-446-20226-9
  • Klaus Biesenbach: Henry Darger , Prestel Verlag, Munich 2009 ISBN 978-3-7913-4210-8
  • Michael Bonesteel (Ed.): Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings . Rizzoli, New York, 2000. ISBN 0-8478-2284-2
  • Bernard Bourrit: Henry Darger - Espace mouvant. In: “La part de l'oeil: revue annuelle” No. 20, Bruxelles: Pr. De l'Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles, 2005, pp. 252-259.
  • Mark Danielewski: '' Das Haus - House of Leaves ''. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2007, ISBN 978-3-608-93777-0
  • Neil Gaiman: '' Sandman: Eternal Nights ''. Panini, Nettetal-Kaldenkirchen, 2006. ISBN 978-3-86607-270-1
  • Finn-Olaf Jones: '' Landlord's Fantasy ''. In: '' Forbes '' April 25, 2005 , last documented October 17, 2007
  • John MacGregor: Henry Darger - In the Realms of the Unreal . New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002. ISBN 0-929445-15-5
  • Cyndy L. Morrison: The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress: Looking for Henry Darger . New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005. ISBN 978-0-374-22589-6
  • Peter Schjeldahl: Folks - a new home for unsung artists . In: The New Yorker January 14, 2002, pp. 88–89, last accessed October 17, 2007

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the Realms of the Unreal synopsis at PBS
  2. ↑ http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/Darger1000.shtml Darger show review at ARTScope
  3. ↑ Jackson, Kevin, "Postcards from the Edge." In the London Independent , August 26, 2005, webpage found 23 June 2007 .
  4. ^ "Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal" by John M. MacGregor at Salon.com ( Memento of the original from July 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dir.salon.com
  5. ^ MacGregor, John M. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002.
  6. ↑ Rich, Nathaniel, "Storm of Creativity." In The New Republic , January 5, 2005
  7. ↑ Darger, like his father, was familiar with the civil war
  8. ↑ John M. MacGregor book review
  9. ↑ Park, Ed, “The Outsiders,” in The Village Voice , April 17, 2003, webpage found October 10, 2007 .
  10. ^ Trent, James W., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States . University of California Press, 1994, pp. 119-122
  11. ↑ Neil Gaiman: Sandman: Eternal Nights . Panini, Nettetal-Kaldenkirchen 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Darger, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American outsider artist, painter, writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1973
Place of death Chicago