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The Secret World of an Outsider Artist:
An exhibition currently on view at The Andy Warhol Museum reveals the prolific and eccentric work of Henry Darger, an artist unknown to the world until his death in 1973.

By Graham Shearing,independent art critic

Nobody knew that the old man, who had lived almost all his working life as a janitor in Chicago hospitals, as a tenant in a grubby one-room apartment, and, at the end, under the watchful care of the Little Sisters of the Poor in a home for the aged, had kept a momentous secret. This was Henry Darger (1892-1973), who never had even his allotted Warholian 15 minutes, but whose fame is quickly reaching a tremendous climax. It is only now, 33 years after his death, that his work can be seen at The Andy Warhol Museum in the exhibition Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum.

Outsider artists commonly live the creative part of their lives hidden from the world, only to be discovered and celebrated in old age or after their deaths. Darger is considered an outsider artist, which means his work falls outside the traditions of art making. Often, the mad or the dysfunctional, or the untrained, primitive artist finds a home in this genre. Outsider art catches us off-guard with its raw, sometimes strange, and often unrefined insights.

Darger is best known for his hundreds of odd watercolor drawings of young girls, soldiers, and dragons set in picturesque landscapes, which are often threatened by tornadoes, or disrupted by warfare or other acts of unexpected violence. Simply and colorfully illustrated, the illustrations, which can be up to nine feet long, double-sided, and stiff with adhering collage, were once bound up together accompanied by 30,000 pages of text, including the masterpiece he titled 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. If not for the scale of the work, the strangeness of the accompanying story’s content, and the enormity and consistency of the vision, Darger’s drawings would be nothing special.

The Lonely Misfit
Darger experienced what can only be described as a horrible life. His mother died in childbirth when he was 4. His only sister was adopted and totally lost to him. His father placed him in an orphanage at the age of 8, and he spent his adolescence in an asylum, declared weak-minded. As a child, he witnessed a traumatic tornado in his hometown just outside Chicago, which was to haunt his memoirs and his art. As an adult in Chicago, he barely scraped by on his janitorial pay.

Right: Study Of Vivian Girl With Doll,
Watercolor, carbon tracing, and pencil on paper. Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York. © Kiyoko Lerner.

Descriptions of Darger indicate a cantankerous misfit, scavenging from dumpsters, disconcertingly dressed. However, he appears to have been a devout Catholic and a regular at mass.

When he became too frail to navigate the stairs to his apartment, Darger handed over its entire contents to his landlord and submitted himself to the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor to await death.

And yet, from that single-room apartment emerged one of the world’s most distinctive artists. We know what Darger wrote and how he wrote it. His autobiography, which is 5,000 pages long, and other matter found in his apartment—all equally as obsessive — constitutes a formidable archive, much of which is housed in the Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Andy Warhol, at one stage of his career, sat on the board of the Folk Art Museum, and his own collection of folk art was once exhibited there.

We also know how Darger constructed his remarkable pictures. In fact, his methods of working are the principal reason why he attracted the interest of The Andy Warhol Museum. John Smith, The Warhol’s assistant director for collections and research, aware of the connections between Darger and Warhol and recognizing other interesting technical parallels in their work jumped at the opportunity to bring Darger’s work to Pittsburgh.

“ Warhol himself had a very distinctive method, which has a great deal in common with Darger’s,” says Smith. “Both appropriated the work of others, particularly illustrations and advertising material, which was not necessarily regarded as art. And, like Warhol, Darger was a pack rat, exhibiting unusual collecting obsessions beyond the material that fueled his art. For Warhol, it was cookie jars; for Darger, empty Pepto-Bismol bottles.”

A curator once warned Warhol of the risks of duplication; for Darger, duplication was his lifeblood. Although Warhol was a highly accomplished artist, he devised simple methods of copying images such as tracing, reversing images, and photographic enlargement. Darger, claiming no graphic skills, reproduced his images by similar methods.

Both reproduction and enlargement dilute the affective quality of the original image. But Darger’s little girls, whether traced or collaged onto his drawing paper, make a virtue of their monotonous duplication. Armies of clones are the unexpected result. The formula is unceasing, the repetitive pattern and succession of bright, flat coloring—which imitates lithographic reproductive methods—echo Warhol’s own banal use of color and design.

Simple Methods, Complex Art
While much of Darger’s work, at first glance, appears to have much in common with a child’s coloring book (Warhol also produced such things), it has no such recipient in mind, and beware the parent that introduces such work to his or her child.

Left: At 5 Norma Catherine. but are retaken, Henry Darger (1892-1973), Chicago, Illinois; mid-twentieth century, Watercolor, pencil and carbon tracing on pieced paper. Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York. © Kiyoko Lerner.

There is an obvious theme to Darger’s drawings that is violent and perversely sexual. The sequences of little girls that he illustrates with such obvious relish are often naked and equipped with penises. This has given rise to complex psychosexual theories about Darger’s private life.

Scenes of violence, young girls brandishing guns, and soldiers throttling girls against a background of threatening skies (that tornado again) contrast with sylvan landscapes, brilliant skies, banks of flowers, and the innocent play of children. It is as if a hellish Apocalypse has come to visit a rural kindergarten.

Theories abound that attempt to explain Darger. It has been suggested that he was a child murderer because newspaper clippings of a particular incident were found among his papers, but there’s no evidence of that. In fact, his life offers no evidence of perversion of any kind. Yet his drawings seem to demand an explanation.

Students of the art of the insane, a very distinct sub-category of outsider art, often see work of this kind. But for art like this to have been created outside of the walls of an asylum and within the secret places of our contemporary cities may make us all catch our breath.

Smith takes a broad view of the artist: “The beauty of Darger’s work is that it lends itself to so many interpretations. In the absence of any statements from Darger himself that might offer interpretative clues or signposts, we are all—curators, art-historians, dealers, critics, psycho-historians, and the public—completely free to read Darger’s work according to our own intuitions and self-interests.”

One thing is surely certain: had Andy Warhol lived to continue his own obsessive habits, at least one watercolor by Henry Darger would have entered his collection. Smith also speculates that had Warhol never gone to Carnegie Tech or to New York, his impulse to create might well have resulted in work not unlike that of Darger.

The ‘definitive’ exhibition of Darger’s work is on view at The Warhol until April 30, although Smith stresses: “Consider the fact that Darger’s work has only recently been accessible. It’s clear that there remains a tremendous amount of research still to do.”

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