Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Henry Darger: In the Realm of the Unreal

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Henry Darger: In the Realm of the Unreal

by John McGee

From "In the Realm of the Unreal" by Henry Darger (Images courtesy Watari-Um Museum)

Between shifts as a hospital caretaker and dishwasher, Henry Darger worked on his 15,145 page novel “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.” The rambling good vs. evil tale follows seven young blonde hermaphrodite princesses, the Vivian Girls, in their eventually successful battle to defend their Catholic republic of Abbiennia against the child-enslaving, apostate men from the land of Glandelinia. 

Darger lived in Chicago from 1892-1973. Orphaned, he grew up in a Catholic boys’ homes and a school for the “feebleminded.” For his last 40 years, he lived a friendless existence in a small rented room, going to Mass up to five times a day. After his death, Darger’s landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner, discovered the worn volumes of the loner’s epic amidst thousands of balls of string and heaps of old magazines, newspapers and weather charts. 

Some suggest Darger’s theme may have been a delayed reaction to the American Civil War. Regardless, his 300 watercolor and collage illustrations for the novel are unique, obsessive combinations where cannons explode in puffy cloud Arcadia and naked kiddies are fetishized as the tortured bodies of Catholicism. This interesting, disturbing show of 26 pages (approximately 48 images—many sheets are painted on both sides) was curated by Kunst-Werke Berlin from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. 

From "In the Realm of the Unreal" by 
Henry Darger

Compared to the cramped doodlings of outsider artists with whom he is sometimes grouped, Darger’s Cinemascope-wide landscape panoramas resemble sketches for theater or film. Child heroines, traced from magazines and kid’s books, pose like fashion models (or classical friezes) in the foreground while the exploding bombs and skewering cavalrymen of 19th-century battles rage behind them. 

The undated paintings form no linear narrative. Themes repeat in cycles: the Vivian Girls and their cohorts flee, are captured, are tortured, flee again. Within each picture, Darger often combined opposing forces. Naked female urchins have penises. Hellish actions disrupt bucolic mise-en-scenes. One basic variation takes place on a perfect summer day: cumulus clouds billow overhead, flowers burst open in watery purples, golds and greens, oak tree-sized mushrooms tower over barns. But all is not well. Nasty men in antique military uniforms and mortarboard hats race across the fields. They fire rifles and round up children, throttling them bare-handed until their eyes bug out and tongues pop from their mouths. 

On the top or bottom edges of the paintings, small handwritten notes name the location and give a brief synopsis, e.g. “At Jennie Richee have thrilling time fleeing through a feild [sic] of gutted bodies of children with shells bursting all around.” By now you can tell that, despite children’s book tropes, this is definitely not for the young. Nearly every scene involves battles, and/or child strangulation, crucifixion, torture or mutilation. One picture is captioned, “...only a few of the thousands of murdered children are shown here.” 

It would be easy to speculate about Darger’s psycho-sexual state. Were this cache of drawings discovered in present-day America, he might be suspected of pedophilia, or worse (somehow British bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman avoid such problems). But Darger seems to have led an uneventful, solitary life, possibly using his artwork as therapy for his own troubled childhood.

This exhibition was held Feb-Apr 2003 at Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art in Jingumae (Aoyama), Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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