Henry Darger, Second day Northwest at Jennie Richee are captured by general Federals glan-deliniam near Aronbury Run River, detail, ca. 1950, Watercolor, pencil, and newspaper collage on paper, 19 x 46".

Henry Darger, They escape again by overpowering guards. Two remained a minute to see that the men didn't get loose. Nothing was straight in …, detail, 19 x 46".

Henry Darger, After M Whurther Run Glandelinians attack and blow up train carrying children to refuge.

Henry Darger's room. This image, was taken by Nathan Lerner during the cleanup of Darger's room in 1972.

Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
773-702-0200
Chicago
Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
for Works on Paper
Drawn from the Home
of Henry Darger
December 22-March 16, 2008

For 40 years, the reclusive janitor and self-taught artist Henry Darger (1892-1973) lived and worked in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Teeming with objects of all sorts — from balls of string and Pepto Bismol bottles to coloring books and art supplies — the room revealed Darger’s treasured collections and aesthetic sensibility. In the room, Darger cocooned himself within the imagery of his art, collecting and cataloguing the children’s books, comics, and magazines that he used to illustrate the fantastical scenes of his 17,545-page, fourteen-volume epic known as In the Realms of the Unreal.

Anchored by two double-sided collage and watercolor drawings, Drawn From the Home of Henry Darger also includes excerpts from In the Realms of the Unreal, archival photographs of Darger’s apartment, and a selection of his source materials and art supplies, on loan from Intuit — The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Together, these drawings and source materials give an intimate glimpse into Darger’s working process and artistic achievements.

At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, 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 story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines — the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight — as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over 20 years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal. He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form Blengiglomeanean Spirits, creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine.

Drawn from the Home of Henry Darger pairs examples of the artist’s work with a selection of source materials and other objects related to the drawings, including samples of coloring books and paint kits, loose clippings of comics and weather scenes (some with pencil or carbon copy marks left from the process of transferring images), as well as scrapbooks and the negative enlargements Darger made from the clippings. The exhibition reveals connections between source materials, the apartment, and Darger’s art, offering an intimate, exemplary glimpse into Darger’s artistic achievements.

The exhibition is curated by Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curatorial Assistant and Curator of the Henry Darger Room Collection at Intuit — The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Henry Darger, At Jennie Richiee, The truck got trouble — some on the plank bridge near a tributary of the Aronburgs run, detail, Watercolor and pencil on paper. (recto).

Above, Henry Darger, At Sunbeam Creek. Below, Henry Darger, At Battle of Drosabella-maximillan.

Anthony Goicolea (b. 1971, Brooklyn, New York), Ash Wednesday, 2001, Color photograph, 40 x 80",Collection of Stephane Janssen, Arizona, Photo courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Amy Cutler (b. 1974, Brooklyn, New York), Traction, 2002, Casein and Flashe on wood, 32 x 60", Collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York, Photo courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Justine Kurland (b. 1969, New York), Battlefield, 2001, Color photograph, 30 x 40", Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Photo courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd Street
212-265-1040
New York
Dargerism:
Contemporary Artists
and Henry Darger
April 15-September 21, 2008

There is a long history of academically trained artists drawing inspiration from self-taught artists and thus freeing themselves to think in unexpected ways and on their own idiosyncratic terms, almost in defiance of what they were taught. Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger examines the influence of Darger's remarkable and cohesive oeuvre on eleven such artists, who are responding not only to the aesthetic beauty of Darger's mythic work — with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and even its transgressive undertone — but to his unblinking work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking. This exhibition demonstrates Darger's pervasive influence on the contemporary art discourse and how an examination of the work of self-taught artists is essential for a full understanding of art history. By leaning into the boundaries of the Western canon, "Dargerism" illustrates how one self-taught master has spawned a new movement, a wholly new "ism."

The American Folk Art Museum is home to the single largest repository of works by one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, Henry Darger (1892-1973), who created nearly three hundred watercolor and collage paintings to illustrate his epic masterpiece, 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, which encompasses more than fifteen thousand pages.

The exhibition features artists Amy Cutler, Henry Darger, Jefferson Friedman, Anthony Goicolea, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Yun-Fei Ji, Justine Kurland, Justin Lieberman, Robyn O'Neil, Grayson Perry, Paula Rego, and Michael St. John.

Curator of the exhibition is Brooke Davis Anderson.

Michael St. John (b. 1957, New York), Blengin, 2002-2003, Polychromed Sculpey and wood, 14 x 5" diam., Private collection, Photo courtesy Marvelli Gallery, New York.

Henry Darger, The Vivian Girls.