Henry Darger | Down the Rabbit Hole

Of the outsider artists there is perhaps none as well known as the reclusive Henry Darger. Although his work was completely unknown during his lifetime, Forbes estimates that his visual art alone sold for more than two million dollars in the 1970s, while his original manuscripts are documents very appreciated. The term outsider art can be difficult to define, but Down The Rabbit Hole logo designer Elise McCall offers this clarifying statement. Quote "An outsider artist is just what his name implies: an outsider at least in relation to the dominant artistic establishment. The simplest characteristic of an outsider artist is that he is self-taught and has very little or no formal training in the arts." Without quotation marks.

Despite his posthumous fame, only four photographs of him have been found, making him a distant, almost intangible figure, and even during his lifetime his acquaintances were not sure how to pronounce his surname. he. So who was this man and how did he create and hide such an extensive work? Very little is known about Henry Darger's childhood. He was born as the first child on April 12, 1892 in Chicago, Illinois. Even less is known about Rosa, his mother, but his father, also named Henry, was a tailor. Young Henry was an extraordinarily intelligent child and his father taught him to read at an early age, using the newspaper as a learning tool even before he entered school.

His mother, however, was not in his life for long. When Darger was four years old, Rosa gave birth to a second child, but she died shortly after from a septic infection due to complications in childbirth. Darger's father, although gainfully employed, considered himself incapable of caring for both his son and his newborn daughter. Then, a month after his birth, Henry Sr. gave the newborn up for adoption to raise Henry, Jr. as an only child. When Darger began his studies, he was placed in third grade instead of first thanks to his uncommon intellect and the guidance of his father.

But this good fortune would not last. When Darger was eight years old, his father lost the ability to walk, so he was admitted to the St. Augustine Nursing Home while his son was sent to live and study at Our Lady of Mercy Mission, a Roman Catholic shelter. . Although he was apparently well cared for, his relationships with the other children were problematic. He commonly disrupted class by making strange noises with his mouth and was occasionally unpleasant and violent towards the other children, even attacking a girl with a knife. In reaction to Darger's disruptive behavior, the shelter ordered a psychiatric evaluation for him.

Upon completion, Darger was sent to live in the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, more than a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. At the time, Darger was 12 years old. According to official records, the main reason for his hospitalization was masturbation. There he suffered abandonment and overcrowding. It was no secret that the asylum used children as labor, as the Lincoln government had fought hard for the institution on the grounds that it would help secure the city's economy. Anne E. Parsons, in her essay “From Asylum to Prison: The Story of Lincoln State School,” quotes: “Lincoln Asylum built its own farm, with workers growing oats and corn and raising hogs and colts.

The farm provided much of the asylum's food, which helped keep it afloat financially. Residents made up the majority of that workforce. between quotation marks. Darger himself was forced to work on the farm from early morning until late afternoon, where violence was encouraged by the foremen to punish children for misbehaving. Only after some time will this abuse come to light. Darger, in his autobiography many years later, wrote about his experience there. He quotes "During the beginning of the summer of fourth year I made my first attempt to run away. But the cowboy on that farm caught me in a cornfield, tied my hands, and made me run back on a horse" without quotes .

Many students of Darger's work suggest that he, too, was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of asylum employees. A possibility that would coincide with the events in asylums at the beginning of the 20th century. Still, in his autobiography, Darger fondly remembers the asylum, which he called the state farm, and says his life there was like a kind of paradise. He follows up with a question: "Do you think I could be foolish enough to run away from heaven if I got there?" Darger made two more attempts to escape. The second time he turned himself in to the police, who quickly returned him to the asylum.

On the third attempt he successfully evaded capture and managed to return to his hometown of Chicago. However, shortly before beginning his escape attempts, he learned that his father had died while he was in the San Agustín Home for the Elderly, so he sought refuge with his godmother, who offered him shelter. At that time, he was 17 years old. Henry Darger wasted no time finding employment. Shortly after his return to Chicago, he worked at St. Joseph Hospital, where he worked as a janitor. The staff also allowed him to live in the place where he kept to himself.

Little is known about him during this period, but he managed to find a friend in a man named William Schloeder, a Chicago resident who lived with his mother and his sisters. As Darger's only friend, the two spent a lot of time together at amusement parks and at Schloeder's house. While in the parks, Darger claims that he intentionally, quote, "made all the expenses." In addition to this, it appears that his time during this period was spent quietly working and living in the hospital, where he attracted little attention and led a simple life, attending mass in the church daily.

It was during this time that Darger set to work on the novel and series of visual pieces that would become his masterpiece. It is not known when she conceived it, but work on it began in 1909. It told the story of The Vivian Girls: seven sisters and princesses of incomparable beauty and virtuosity. He describes them as "always willing to do what they were told, staying away from bad company, going to mass and Holy Communion every day and living the lives of little saints," but these girls were alive while two countries were at war. . The first, Angelinia, is the bright side of Darger's work, as she is a devoutly Christian nation and willing to right any wrongs.

It serves as a hub for a coalition of warring states. On the other side were the evil Glandelinians, who desperately hated Christians and committed violent and heinous crimes, including Darger's most heinous sin: slavery, torture, and the murder of children. There were many familiar characters in his work taken from books in his library, but perhaps the most notable was himself. Darger presents himself as a feared general in Abbie's army, hailing from the distant land of the United States. In history he is especially known for being the protector of children, leading Gemini: a society dedicated to the protection of young boys and girls and that vengefully attacks anyone who wants to harm them.

The co-leader of the Gemini was Darger's dear friend William Schloeder. John Manly, a childhood bully, was immortalized as the leader of the Glandellian forces. This story would be given the remarkably long name "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 Rebellion of the Slave Children." This name is often shortened to simply The Kingdoms. of the unreal. He started by writing it by hand and then moved on to typing it. The visual art that would accompany Darger would be complicated and extensive.

This despite the fact that he had no experience or studies in the arts. Added to this was the problem of his limited disposable income, which was already strained due to his trips to the amusement park. Since he couldn't afford to take drawing lessons, he began using any type of visual art he could get his hands on, which often included photographs and newspaper advertisements. He would also use coloring book pages. As drawing materials he used any blank paper, paints, pens or pencils he could find, including what he found while rummaging through trash bins. On these pieces of paper he copied or traced individual images, sometimes pasting them on the sheet itself and drawing around or on them.

As he practiced this method, his library of reference images grew and he found himself returning to certain images that he reused, creating deep wrinkles in them and wearing them down. When an image he wanted to use was too small, he spent what little money he had left from his salary to buy and enlarge it. These reference images and his copies came to fill his apartment. Darger often drew children frolicking naked in beautiful landscapes with surreal foliage, but there were anatomical oddities. In most cases he simply left his genitals flat like a doll's, but sometimes the girls were drawn with penises and testicles, a footnote that manages to perplex scholars even today.

Theories as to why he did this range from simple ignorance of female anatomy, to a latent unrealized homosexuality, to the belief that only men could wage war and therefore he was adequately equipping them. Of Darger's clippings, there was none he treasured more than that of a girl named Elsie Paroubek, who appeared in the Chicago Daily News after her murder by suffocation in 1911. One day in the summer of 1912, Darger lost his copy of this photograph. Unable to rediscover it in the library's public archives, Darger began frantically asking God for his return, even going so far as to create a shrine in his apartment to which he prayed.

When negotiations failed, he attempted to threaten, but in a peculiar way: if the cut was not returned, then the war within the realms of the unreal would turn against the Christian nations, and yet the cut eluded him. Seeing no other option, she took revenge within his own narrative, turning his avatar against the Christian nation and on the side of the Glandelinians, soliloquizing that God had been too hard on him and that he could not take it anymore. At one point he threatened to stop writing the narrative altogether. This period, however, coincided with the beginning of World War I, and approximately eight years after escaping from the asylum, he was drafted into the army.

Once again they expelled him from his house. This time to a camp in Texas. Of his time there, he wrote: "In some ways I would have liked life in the army, only I was forced to leave behind things I loved too much. It was almost unbearable." It is likely that his experience in the asylum, where he had learned not to respond, was useful to him in the field. However, he got himself discharged due to vision problems, which he admits he exaggerated. His time in the camp served as inspiration for his own war within the Realms of the Unreal, and when he returned, so did the horrors inflicted on the Christian nations and children.

A New York Times article paraphrases Darger's writings. Quote "Girls of nine, eight years old and even younger were tied completely naked and with a shovel full of red hot embers placed on their bellies. Dozens and dozens of poor children were cut into pieces after being strangled to death. The Children were forced to swallow the severed fragments of dead children's hearts and had their protruding tongues removed. In real life, their anger manifested itself in the cessation of their daily visits to church. Darger's love not only for children but also for the carefree times of childhood was unmistakable.

In his story, childhood innocence is seen as one of the most precious assets. high and close to piety, while the dispossession of that innocence is the deepest evil. In his diary he spoke of how he longed once again for his own childhood, however, without a spouse, his low income and his time in an asylum for. masturbation, then associated with homosexuality, his hope for an adoption by the Catholic church proved fruitless. He also blamed this on God for not answering his prayers. He thought the refusal had to do with his threat to make the Christians lose the war, referring to his writings, showing how blurred the line between fiction and reality had become for him.

His work at the hospital, which was returned to him upon his return, proved more difficult than before his recruitment. One nurse in particular, whom he named a DePaul Sister, harassed him during his workday for his work as a janitor. And Darger, who was unresponsive, would calmly accept the abuse. He sometimes even threatened to send him back to the asylum, although by that time he was too old to return, but even this couldn't make him angry. However, as soon as he returned to his room, long discussions would begin in which he would play as himself and as DePaul, from which he would always emerge victorious.

In his room she also adopted the voices of many other people, and laterThe neighbors talked about how there seemed to be a lot of people in his room, with many different dialects and registers. Despite these dramas, Darger's daily life was surprising because of how servile she was. He would do very little besides create The Realms of the Unreal, work at the hospital, and visit his friend William Schloeder. Finally, citing Sister DePaul's strict nature, he left her job and found work at another hospital as a dishwasher. This meant that he would have to look for a new residence.

He spent a few years in an apartment within walking distance of his new workplace before moving to another, just two blocks from the first. This room turned out to be more permanent and little by little garbage accumulated, in some places up to knee height. Items like empty Pepto-Bismol bottles and old newspapers. His habits were strange. He recited a chant before entering the bathroom and claimed that he was born in Brazil through his birth certificate. He clearly stated that he was born in Chicago. He had no visitors. No one would interrupt him while he wrote his play about the Vivian Girls and their narrow escapes from the Glandelinians.

Then one day, suddenly, Darger's hatred of God ceased. Darger wrote in his diary one day about reading a comic about a man who was sent to hell for his sins. According to him, this was enough to scare him into returning his faith to the church and trusting that, for some reason, God decided to take the photograph away from him, perhaps as a test of faith. Parallel to this change in his temperament, his avatar within the story also returned to the faith, turning his allegiance to the Christian forces to fight against the Glandelinians. Shortly after, the story would come to an end.

Darger's collected works totaled approximately 15,000 pages, collected in seven hand-bound volumes and eight unbound volumes. The content of the latter was not clearly arranged and some parts of the narrative were not given a place, making it difficult to discern where exactly they belonged, but this did not seem to bother him. Surprisingly, there were two endings written for The Realms of the Unreal: one where the Christian forces triumph and another where they are defeated and John Manly reigned supreme. Each one is written on a different side of the same sheet of paper. It is not clear exactly when he finished this work, but the completion of The Realms of the Unreal did not mark the end of his writing efforts, which he continued while working at his menial job at the hospital.

As the years went by he would move between hospitals. In 1936 he was asked to leave Grant Hospital, after which he was rehired at St. Joseph's, where he had previously worked. Then, in 1947, he moved to Alexian Brothers Hospital, again as a dishwasher, but when this task became too strenuous for his aging body, he was moved to the dressing room. Over the next two decades he quietly worked on a sequel to The Realms of the Unreal titled More Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, although it appears this story had far fewer illustrations than The Realms of the Unreal.

It was during this time that William Schloeder made the difficult decision to move to Texas with his sister, and shortly after moving, he died. With no other friends and a solitary lifestyle, Henry Darger was alone. As time went on, age began to take its toll on his body and he was forced to retire and collect Social Security in 1963. During this time he began working on some other writings. One of them was a weather diary that lasted exactly 10 years in which he chastised the meteorologist for trying to predict what the Bible said would always be unpredictable. This newspaper also highlighted his penchant for long names.

Book of weather reports on temperatures, fairly cloudy to clear skies, snow, summer rain or storms, and winter snows and large blizzards, also the "low" temperatures of intense cold waves and summer heat spells. He also wrote about himself in a book titled The Story of My Life, in which he devotes 206 pages to selectively recounting his experiences. However, this suddenly goes from an autobiography to a five thousand page fiction detailing the devastating tale of a tornado named sweetiepie. Besides this, his life was abnormally calm. With so much time on his hands, he began attending church much more frequently, sometimes five masses a day.

Darger's neighbors, despite his reclusive lifestyle, seemed to feel sorry for him and, when interviewed about him, generally spoke of him in a positive tone. They often helped him however they could and when he could no longer pay the rent, the landlords would cut his payments by a quarter so he could continue living there. But this situation would not last the entire decade. Darger's legs, like his father's, had begun to fail, and when he was hit by a car in 1969, his leg problems worsened to the point that he had difficulty climbing the stairs to his third-floor room. .

In 1972, he asked his landlords to help him move to St. Augustine's Charity Nursing Home, the place where his father had gone when he was first abandoned at the orphanage. As time went by his memory began to fade and he could no longer recognize his former neighbors who sometimes came to visit him. Since Darger couldn't clean his old room, owners Nathan and Kyoko Lerner began the arduous process of cleaning it for him. That's when they discovered the incredible amount of hidden work. Kyoko's initial reaction was to throw it away, but Nathan refused. All of Darger's neighbors came to see the work and were stunned by the beauty of his visual artistry.

Shortly after they went to visit him. When one mentioned the artwork to him and complimented him on it, Darger reacted with surprise, but all he responded was, "It's too late." Very soon after this incident, Henry Darger died peacefully. All of his works inevitably fell into the hands of his owners, the Lerners, who ended up auctioning them and selling them or donating them to museums. The reaction of art scholars was immediately one of simultaneous fascination and repulsion. He was widely believed to be a murderer and a pedophile due to his obsessive nature and his collection of reference images of little girls.

Still, these suspicions could not quench the fascination with him and his works are now highly appreciated. In 2000, his pieces could be purchased at auction for up to $80,000, a figure that now reaches seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That same year, the Outsider and Folk Art Museum Intuit in Chicago installed a permanent exhibit of the contents of his room while the Lerners were cleaning it out. His works were slightly renovated and placed in climate-controlled archive rooms due to the fragility of his cheap materials. Over time, Darger scholarship appears to have moved away from accusations of murder and pedophilia toward a more comprehensive understanding.

Although his works remain unpublished, they have still aroused the fascination and interest of artists around the world, as a man who truly dedicated himself to his art. In a way, he embodies the idea of ​​the heroic artist who creates simply for the sake of creating, without caring what the world may think.