REALMS
OF THE UNREAL
By
Stephen
Prokopoff
Henry Darger was one of
those people hardly anyone notices, who, seemingly, move through life as
shadows. Born in 1892, possibly in Brazil or in Germany by his various
accounts and perhaps bearing the surname, Dargarius, young Henry lived
with his father- "a tailor and a kind and easygoing man" in Chicago
until 1900. In that year the elder and crippled Darger had to be taken
to live in a Catholic Mission and his son was placed in a Catholic boys'
home. Darger Sr. died in 1905 and his son was institutionalized as
feeble-minded, apparently on the basis of a doctor's diagnosis that
"Little Henry's heart is not in the right place." A series of escapes
ended successfully in 1908. The 16-year-old Darger found menial
employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to
support himself for the following 50 years. His life took on a pattern
that seems to have varied little: he attended Mass daily, frequently
returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a
bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby; he
was a solitary. In 1930 he settled into a second-floor room on
Chicago's north side. It was in this room, more than 40 years later,
after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was
discovered.
Amid a thick
accumulation of debris- including hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles,
nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic
books, religious kitsch and much more- his landlord, the photographer
Nathan Lerner, found a creative life's work: an enormous literary and
pictorial production. The key element was a picaresque tale in 12
massive volumes composed of some 19,000 pages of legal-sized paper
filled with single-spaced typing 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.
The origins of this epic appear to be in 1909. It took more than eleven
years to write it in longhand; in 1912 Darger began the task of typing
the still incomplete manuscript.
The story
recounts the wars between the nations on an enormous and unnamed planet,
of which Earth is a moon. The conflict is provoked by the
Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. After hundreds of
ferocious battles, the good Christian nation of Abbiennia forces the
“haughty” Glandelinians to give up their barbarous ways. The heroines
of Darger’s history are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian
princesses. They are sided in their struggles by a panoply of heroes,
who are sometimes the author’s alter-egos. The battles are full of
vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures, storms and
explosions, the appearance of demons and dragons. Darger possessed a
wealth of information about military matters and particularly about the
Civil War. Not surprisingly the details of battles are recorded in
precise quartermaster style in supplemental volumes. In one, for
example, he carefully drew and colored the hundreds of flags of the
warring nations. Another lists literally thousands of names of officers
in the contending armies and their fates (among these, some are
described as “killed” while others are “mortally wounded”.) The true
heroes of these adventures, however, are children- the favorites of God,
according to the author. The epic’s happy conclusion is only reached
after his young protagonists survive great trials, including
humiliation, enslavement and torture.
By far the
most important supplement to the book, however, exists in the several
hundred watercolor paintings Darger left in his room, many of them
illustrations for The Realms of the Unreal. They transform
Darger’s apocalyptic text into a body of images that are among the most
original and beautiful in outsider art. These works- pencil drawings on
paper painted over with watercolor and occasional additions of collage-
illustrate incidents in the book with a precision and amplitude of
detail not possible in a written narrative. Textual annotations are
also typically parts of these compositions, suggesting that picturing
the reality of the event by every means available was a pressing need
for the artist. The sizes of Darger’s work range from the measurements
of standard drawing pads to mural-sized works made of joined sheets of 3
or 4 feet high and as much as 10 to 12 feet long. The sheer number of
large format works makes it clear that Darger conceived the epic format
as appropriate to the dimensions of his vision. Because artists’
materials were costly, Darger’s sheets usually contain finished,
independent compositions on both sides. The logistics of how Darger was
able to work on these large pictures in the cramped quarters he occupied
are remarkable. The only conclusion possible is that he worked in the
manner of scroll painters- one segment at a time. But if this is the
case, memory had to be relied upon to govern the overall coherence of
these exceedingly complex compositions.
There is
little purpose to add to the polemic that has continued over the last
several decades concerning the artistic validity of outsider art. The
great emotional and formal beauties found in the best examples of this
work as well as its profound influence on “high art” in our time would
appear to have settled the matter. Darger was certainly an untutored
artist in any traditional sense and his work, like that of other
outsiders, stands outside of the history of art. He probably never
visited a museum and had only very limited exposure to art. Yet his
creative sensibility was such that it was possible for him to spin gold
from the daily experience and fantasy, which in his mind easily
co-mingled. If Darger was largely ignorant of art in the museums, he was
in close touch with the abundant imagery of popular culture available to
the pack-rat collector. Topical events are continually reflected in his
texts and images just as cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, comic
books and religious tracts easily found a place in his visual
narratives.
Like all
genuine talents, Darger developed a set of techniques that was at once
individual and entirely adequate to his expressive requirements. He was
at best a mediocre draftsman, for example, having particular trouble
with human figures. Yet Darger created an art filled with legions of
figures whose images were appropriated. Darger’s method was to simply
trace images from children’s book illustrations, comic strips and
similar sources. If the needed image was not of the required size, the
artist would take it to the photography counter of a near-by drugstore
and have it enlarged or reduced to the proper measurements. Frequently
favorite images were repeated in a given picture as well as additional
works. Other elements deemed suitable- butterfly cut-outs, Mickey Mouse
and Donald Duck, fragments from coloring books and game boards and many
more- were confiscated into Darger’s pictures and, because of the easy
alliance in them of the real and the imagined, seemed perfectly at home.
Darger’s
particular brilliance lies in a keen organizational sense. His major
compositions bring together massive casts of characters in ways that
surely would have gladdened the heart of a Cecil B. DeMille. These
elaborate forces are deployed with a sure eye for intricate, often
cunningly balanced relationships that activate the entire picture
plane. Darger’s compositions are commonly set in expansive landscapes
or, somewhat less frequently, in interiors, both particularly
well-suited to the horizontal format he favored.
There is a
constant attention to the distribution of visual incident over both
ground, sky or wall planes. Darger’s skies, for example, are always
active, often with storm clouds and networks of lightning or with cloud
forms containing double images of figures or faces. As a child, Darger
witnessed a devastating tornado, and skies with rolling clouds and
electrical fireworks are often present in his more turbulent scenes. I
benign settings the artist contrives rich and colorful patterns in
depictions of crowds of children, flowers and radiantly colored insects.
One of the
most appealing and consistently rewarding aspects of Darger’s art is his
sumptuous feeling for color. His richly orchestrated palette reinforces
compositional structure and provides treasures of felicitous and often
unexpected harmonies. Even in the most pale and subtle combinations of
hue, Darger establishes chromatic relationships that are opulently
atmospheric.
Darger’s
imagery, when it details mayhem and sometimes the lurid mistreatment of
little girls, can be distressing. An observer characterized a picture
in a sunny landscape in which images of children, exotic flowers,
butterflies and exploding bombs were joined as “being like Beirut.” The
only possible response in such instances is that art, being often
fashioned from artists’ obsessions, is rarely a vehicle for the
description of perfection: Darger created art from the visions available
to him.
Viewers are
also perplexed by the clearly androgynous anatomy of Darger’s nymphettes,
curiously enough a trait never in evidence among the seven angelic
Vivian girls. It is not possible to fathom the causes or intricacies of
Darger’s fantasies, but it should be said that his public behavior
appears to have been without blemish. A saintly man who frequently
attended Mass, Darger saw himself as the ardent protector of children.
He could, therefore, in his words and images, subject his creatures to
terrible trials from which it was in his power to rescue them. The
wars, fires and tempests that form the context of his art undoubtedly
reflect an unconscious conflict that seems to have given him little
respite. God was Darger’s protagonist and consequently the conflict
could be nothing less than cosmic. This poignant struggle is
extensively documented in the artist’s diaries, which record by turns
his pleading and rancorous exchanges with the Creator. If Darger’s
fantasies often hovered on the fringes of sanity, his art enabled him to
transform his obsessions into a luminous production that, in its best
moments, transcends the pain and circumstances of its making.
