Henry Darger American nationality Born in Chicago, Illinois, on April the 12th, 1892 Dies in Chicago in 1973

Henry Darger is four years old when his mother dies, giving birth to a little girl. This little sister is given to a foster family and he will never see her again. When he reaches the age of seven, his father, incapable of assuming the needs of his child, sends him to an orphanage. Henry will end up in an institution for retarded children where he suffers from violence and bullying. He runs away at the age of seventeen. We know very little about the next phase of his life.

It seems that in 1913, he witnesses the total destruction of a city by a tornado. Traces of him have been found from the early 20s when he was a janitor in a Chicago hospital. He will remain there his entire life, until his retirement after suffering a leg injury in 1963. In 1911, at the age of nineteen, he begins writing a saga that will fill more than fifteen thousand pages. The fifteen volumes, abundantly illustrated, are 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. He describes the combat of the virtuous and immortal Vivian girls, who are helped by Captain Henry Darger, the leader of an organization protecting children against the evil adults, the Glandelinians, who attempt to capture the children in order to induce them to slavery, torture them and assassinate them..

Darger illustrates his epic on large sheets of paper covered on both sides (some are more than nine feet), some with illustrations cut out from magazines. These drawings represent little girls (some with the genitals of little boys) pursued by cruel soldiers, terrorized by devastating tornadoes or deadly explosions. Some scenes depict these girls strangled by phantomatic adults. Every figure is enhanced with gouache. Darger loves colors and one can only agree with John MacGregor when he says: "Nowadays very few artists can use yellows, reds and purples with Darger's talent. There are even less of them who can render nature's green light before the storm." Darger's obsession is about lost children and their adoption. A goal continuously destroyed by a powerless God who turns down this destiny. It could be the story of a fight, Henry Darger's fight against the one that harasses him and is determined to destroy him. He seems often out of control, cursing at God, throwing small string balls against the little religious statues set on the mantelpiece to knock them down, like in those games with cans in the amusement parks; and the next day, Henry spends the whole day in church, begging for forgiveness. After 1946, he uses photographic enlargements and tracing paper in order to duplicate the same image. This cloning technique will help enrich his works, giving them a stronger imagery but also proving - by increasing their numbers - the power of the children's army. When Darger uses scissors and glue, it is not because he does not care about the drawing but it helps him with the military strategy and the symbolic rescue of the children. In his own way he feels that - by cutting out their images - he adopts them. One could also say that by exposing them to gunfire, he puts their lives in danger. The signification of this technique is as ambiguous and complex as Darger's work. (Cf. Journal, Interpreting: Henry Darger, p.325.) Darger's landlord, the painter and photographer Nathan Lerner, never knew anything about his tenant's activities. At the age of eighty-one, Henry Darger, incapable of climbing up the stairs to his room, asked Lerner to put him in a nursing home. It was then that Nathan discovered Henry's room. The walls of the room were blackened by soot coming from the coal heating; the room itself had probably never been cleaned in fifty years. Heaps of newspapers, magazine clippings and objects were piled up to the ceiling. The room guarded a treasure, an exceptional and disturbing work. Henry lived in absolute solitude, working during the day, going to church once or twice a day and spent nights drawing and writing. His work is also a diary, notes on weather reports, files full of newspaper clippings about lost or murdered children. Henry Darger lived and created in total anonymity. When Kiyoko Lerner, Nathan's wife, crossed the path of this bum looking old man returning from church and asked him how he was, Henry, without looking up, responded: "Maybe the wind will stop blowing tomorrow."

SEE ALSO: MacGREGOR (John). Henry J. Darger: Dans les Royaumes de l'Irréel. Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne/Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, 1997.

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