Word: darger
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...