psychoceramics: Henry Darger

["Andrew C. Bulhak" <acb @ cs.monash.edu.au>]

One subject of interest to psychoceramicists is kook art.  And it seems
that, these days, kook art and "outsider art" is gaining in interest.
One of the best known kook artists was probably Henry Darger.
There is an exhibit of his work in the Museum of American Folk Art
in New York (information and two sample images are at 
http://www.folkartmuse.org/exhibit/current/current.html).
There was also an article about Darger's work in TIME Magazine
recently:


[http://pathfinder.com/time/magazine/1997/dom/970224/the_arts_art.a_life_of.html]
[ deletia ]
> 
> One of them--now become one of the stars of an anti-star system--lived
> and died in Chicago. Reclusive, poor and harmlessly mad, Henry Darger
> (1892-1973) was one of the legion of those who fall through the cracks
> in American life, never to emerge again. Brought up from age eight in
> the miseries of Catholic boys' homes (and later in an asylum for
> feebleminded children, from which he managed to escape at 16), he
> supported himself for decades doing menial work in several Catholic
> hospitals. Intensely, not to say neurotically, pious, he went to Mass
> as often as five times a day. For the last 40 years of his life he
> dwelled in a small rented room on Chicago's North Side, from which he
> would timorously sally forth to collect street trash. After his
> pauper's death, hundreds of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles and nearly a
> thousand balls of string were found in his room. He had no friends and
> talked to himself incessantly in various voices. He did, however, have
> a secret life of disconcerting size and visionary intensity. Its
> traces were found after his death by his landlord, a photographer
> named Nathan Lerner, who preserved them. Some of them--63
> watercolors--are on view through April 27 in a show curated by Stephen
> Prokopoff at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan.
> 
> The work of Darger's life was a saga titled The Story of the Vivian
> Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the
> Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
> He wrote it in longhand, and then typed it out; the typescript ran to
> more than 15,000 pages. It is a seemingly endless, repetitious and
> obsessively detailed narrative of child martyrdom, massacre and Edenic
> innocence set on an imaginary planet largely populated by moppets of
> six to 10.
> 
> One of its nations, Glandelinia, is villainously cruel and built on
> child slavery. The good country of Abbiennia, on the other hand, is
> pious, Catholic and freedom loving, and it goes to war against the
> Glandelinians to liberate the tots. In its struggles it is led by
> seven little princesses called the Vivian sisters (shades of Enid
> Blyton and Ethel M. Dell!). They are aided by benign dragonlike beasts
> called Blengins. Virtue triumphs in the end--over whole landscapes of
> child corpses. Since Darger probably began writing the work between
> 1910 and 1912, it's likely that his unreadable Iliad of two nations
> contending over slavery was a delayed response to the great trauma
> affecting his father's generation, the American Civil War.
> 
> He illustrated it--copiously. All of Darger's paintings served this
> obsessive narrative, beginning with small portraits of imaginary
> generals and developing into 12-ft.-long scrolls, done in watercolor
> and collage on joined sheets of paper. Darger had no formal training,
> and as far as is known he never visited a museum, although there are
> faint signs that he might have seen reproductions of Gauguin. He made
> it all up as he went along, according to the dictates of his
> compulsion. Since he couldn't draw the human body, he traced his
> muffin heroines and victims from children's books, comic strips and
> advertisements. He would then give the naked ones tiny penises and
> sometimes, even more puzzling, horns.
> 
> Bizarre obsessions don't make interesting art in themselves, but
> Darger had genuine talent beyond them, particularly in his power of
> formal arrangement and his sense of color. At their best, his friezes
> of androgynous Shirley Temploids hold the long scroll format
> beautifully, with a fine sense of interval and grouping. With the big,
> delicate flowers and butterflies alternating with weird, cavernous
> landscapes, searchlight rays and puffs of rifle smoke, they are like a
> skewed version of Kate Greenaway's Victorian illustrations. The pale,
> blooming color is rarely less than inventive, and it can break out
> into a startling decorative richness--as in Two Spangled Blengins,
> showing a pair of dragons with striped and polka-dotted wings hovering
> protectively around a cutout of a little girl.