Het was daarbij de bedoeling exposities te organiseren van een kunst, die hij omschreef als "...allerlei producties (tekeningen, schilderijen, haakwerken, gemodelleerde of gesculpteerde figuren, enz.) met een spontaan en inventief karakter, die zo weinig mogelijk afhankelijk zijn van de gewone kunst of van culturele voorschriften en die voortkomen van duistere personen, die vreemd zijn aan de professionele artistieke milieus...". De gevestigde kunst noemde hij Art Culturel, die echter nooit puur kon zijn.
Er volgden geruchtmakende exposities van oa. Adolf Wölfli en Joseph Crépin, doch de Compagnie hield het maar uit tot in oktober 1951.
Ze werd heropgericht in juli 1962, maar nu ondergebracht in de Rue de Sèvres, 137. Naast de exposities, publiceerde men, vanaf 1964, de Cahiers de l'Art Brut en l'Art Brut dans l'écrire.
Externe link
Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland
Henry Joseph Darger (April 12[?], 1892–April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a janitor in Chicago, Illinois.[1] He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called 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, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.[2] Darger's work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.
Life
Darger was born in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated. His "Draft Registration Card" for the First World War, which was filled out on June 2, 1917, and is online at ancestry.com [3] gives the date as April 17, 1892.
Cook County records show that he was born at home, at 350 W. 24th Street in Chicago. When he was four years old, his mother, Rose (or "Rosa" or "Rosie") (née Fullman), died after having given birth to a daughter, who was given up for adoption; Henry Darger never knew his sister. Darger's biographer, the art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rose had had two children before Henry, but their whereabouts are unknown.[3]
By Darger's own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind to him, and they lived together until 1900. In that year, the crippled and impoverished Darger Sr. had to be taken to live at St. Augustine's Catholic Mission home and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr. died in 1905, and his son was institutionalized in Lincoln, Illinois, with the diagnosis, according to Stephen Prokopoff, that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place." According to John MacGregor, the diagnosis was actually "self-abuse," which A. M. Holmes takes as a euphemism for masturbation, rather than as meaning self-injury.
Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result. He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (akin to Tourette Syndrome), which irritated others. The Lincoln asylum's practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into In the Realms of the Unreal. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies. While he was there, he received word that his father had died. A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he walked back to Chicago from the asylum for "feeble-minded children" in Lincoln, and it was on this journey that he witnessed a huge tornado that devastated the central Illinois area. He described it as "a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man's conception" .[4] [5] There was a tornado that hit the eastern edge of Tampico, Illinois, on Wednesday, November 25, 1908, at 7 p.m. Many barns, windmills and out buildings were turned over, smashed and demolished. Dwellings suffered a small amount of damage. No one was injured and no livestock killed.[6] Tampico is located about 40 miles east-northeast of Moline and approximately 110 miles west of Chicago and 125 miles due north of Lincoln.
The 16-year old returned to Chicago and, with the help of his godmother, found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself until his retirement in 1963.
Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I, his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Catholic Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended. He was largely solitary; his one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind with Darger on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society," which would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s, but he and Darger stayed in touch through letters until Shloder's death in 1959.
In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's North Side, at 851 W. Webster Avenue, in the Lincoln Park section of the city, near the DePaul University campus. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was discovered.
Darger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death, a day after his birthday, on April 13, 1973. Nathan Lerner, an accomplished photographer whose long career the New York Times wrote "was inextricably bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago",[7] recognized immediately the artistic merit of Darger's work.
By this time Darger was in the Catholic mission, St. Augustine's, where his father had died, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Lerners took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger has become internationally recognized thanks to the efforts of the people he knew to save his works. After Nathan Lerner's death in 1997, Kiyoko Lerner became the sole figure in charge of both her husband and Darger's estates. The U.S. copyright representative for Estate of Henry Darger and the Estate of Nathan Lerner is the Artists Rights Society.[8]
Darger is buried in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois, in a plot called "The Old People of the Little Sisters of the Poor Plot." Darger's modest headstone is inscribed "Artist" and "Protector of Children."[9]
[edit] In the Realms of the Unreal
Darger's work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal postulates a large planet around which Earth orbits as a moon and where most people are Christian (mostly Catholic). The majority of the story concerns the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven sisters who are princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia and who assist a daring rebellion against the evil John Manley's regime of child slavery imposed by the Glandelinians. The latter resemble Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War. (Darger, like his father, was a Civil War expert.) Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology also includes a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form, even disguising themselves as children. They are usually (but not always) benevolent; some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian atrocities.
In the Realms of the Unreal, includes 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, and extends over 15 immense, densely-typed volumes, and at 15,145 pages, is perhaps the longest known work of fiction ever written. The text is accompanied by three bound volumes of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper, the work of six decades, derived from magazines and coloring books. In addition, Darger wrote an eight volume, 5,084-page autobiography, The History of my Life; a 10-year daily weather journal; assorted diaries; and a second work of fiction, provisionally entitled Crazy House, of over 10,000 handwritten pages.
In 1917, Darger tried to begin the process of reconstructing his shattered family life. He attempted to adopt a child, but his repeated efforts failed. Still searching for the child to which he was denied in reality, a richly symbolic substitute was found in a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Daily News from May of 1911 of a photograph of a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek, who was kidnapped and killed and her body thrown in a canal. This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive of clippings Darper had been gathering. There is no indication that the murder or the news photo and article had any particular significance for Darger, until one day he could not find it among his personal effects. Writing in his journal at the time, he began to process this forfeiture of yet another child, lamenting that "the huge disaster and calamity" of his loss "will never be atoned for," but "shall be avenged to the uttermost limit."[10]
The fictive war that was sparked by Darger's loss of the newspaper photograph of the strangled girl, whose murderer was never found,[11] became Darger's lifetime magnum opus. According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. When he located the picture in a public library newspaper archive, he couldn't have it photocopied, and his attempts to trace it proved futile. Paroubek, under the name of Annie Aronburg, became a character in the story.
In In the Realms of the Unreal, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Annie Aronburg . . . was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government," and was the cause of the war. Through their sufferings, the Vivian Girls are hoped to be able to bring about a triumph of Christianity. Darger provided two endings to the story: In one, the Vivian Girls and Christianity are triumphant; in the other, they are defeated and the godless Glandelinians reign.
Darger's human figures were rendered largely by tracing, collage, or photo enlargement from popular magazines and children's books. (Much of the "trash" he collected was old magazines and newspapers, which he clipped for source material.) Some of his favorite figures were the Coppertone Girl and Little Annie Rooney. He is praised for his natural gift for composition and the brilliant use of color in his watercolors. The images of daring escapes, mighty battles, and painful torture are reminiscent of events in Catholic history; the text makes it clear that the child victims are heroic martyrs like the early saints. One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is an apparent transgenderism: Characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender, some females have penises. Some feel Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy, that he meant it as a symbol of power (a chapter of In the Realms of the Unreal includes an articulate rant on the ability of girls to accomplish as much as boys), or that he modeled the girls after images of the infant Jesus.
[edit] Darger's mental state
Much modern fascination with Darger concerns his portrayal of horrific brutality displayed against children.[citation needed]
Darger understood something of the nature of his devastated upbringing. In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote of children's right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart."[12]
He mourned life itself. In the last entry in his diary, before his April 1973 death, he wrote: "January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now.... I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am. ..."[13]
[edit] Last years
In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on memories of the tornado he had witnessed in 1908. He also kept a diary to chronicle the weather and his daily activities. Darger often concerned himself with the plight of abused and neglected children; the institution where he had lived as a boy was brought under investigation in a huge scandal shortly before he left [14] [15] and he might have seen victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked.
A second work of fiction, provisionally entitled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, contains over 10,000 handwritten pages. Written after The Realms, it takes that epic's major characters—the seven Vivian sisters and their companion/secret brother, Penrod—and places them in Chicago, with the action unfolding during the same years as that of the earlier book. Begun in 1939, it is a tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or has an evil consciousness of its own. Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. The Vivians and a male friend are sent to investigate and discover that the murders are the work of evil ghosts. The girls go about exorcising each room until the house is clean.
[edit] Posthumous fame and influence
Darger is one of the most famous figures in the history of outsider art. At the Outsider Art Fair, held every January in New York City, and at auction, his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum, New York City, opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001.[16] His work commands upward of $80,000 and his room is re-created at a new permanent exhibition at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, a Chicago gallery.[17][18]
A 2008 exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum, titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger," examined the influence of Darger's oeuvre on eleven artists who were responding not only to the aesthetic nature of Darger's mythic work -- with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and its transgressive undertone -- but also to his driven work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking.[19]
[edit] Darger in popular culture
Since his death in 1973 and the discovery of his massive opus, and especially since the 1990s, there have been many references in popular culture to Darger's work—references by other visual artists (including, but not limited to, artists of comics and graphic novels); numerous songs by artists from Snakefinger (one of the earliest, in 1979) to Natalie Merchant (on her 2001 album Motherland); a 1999 book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery; and a 2004 multimedia piece by choreographer Pat Graney incorporating Darger images. These artists have variously drawn from and responded to Darger's artistic style, his themes (especially the Vivian Girls, the young heroines of Darger's massive illustrated novel), and the events in his life. Jessica Yu's 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal details Darger's life and artworks. Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up include a track entitled "Vivian Girls" on the 2006 album Hidden World, the lyrics of which deal with the violent plot and the nature of Darger's fixation on the virginal main characters.[citation needed]
The Vivian Girls were also namechecked by San Francisco guitarist Snakefinger (Philip Lithman Roth), an associate of the Residents, in his song "The Vivian Girls." The song was also recorded by Camper Van Beethoven offshoot Monks of Doom on their 1989 LP "The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company."
Sufjan Stevens released a song titled "The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies" on his 2006 compilation album The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album.
The band From Autumn to Ashes references Darger in the song "Placentapede".
Indie rock band …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have a song titled "Segue: In the Realms of the Unreal" on their 2006 album So Divided.
Neil Gaiman also references Darger's work in a story contained in a Sandman collection, Endless Nights. In the episode called Going Inside, Delirium is saved from having gone too deep inside her own mind by five mentally challenged people and her guardian dog. One of the characters, an old man, is writing and illustrating a mammoth project that resembles Darger's work very closely in the loneliness of his own house. However, the reference has to be considered inspirational rather than factual, as fictional details, such as the man punishing himself for not having written enough pages per day, are installed into the character's story.
Philadelphia duo The Vivian Girls Experience take their name and image from Darger's work.
Indie band Tilly and the Wall have a song titled Lost Girls which was inspired by Darger's work.
Artist/Activist Paul Chan created an artwork in 2003 entitled "Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization--After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier"
The band formerly known as Mazarin (now called Black Stoltzfus) has a song called "Henry Darger".
Chicago theatre company Dog And Pony created and produced an original work, entitled "As Told By The Vivian Girls," based on In The Realms Of The Unreal, and performed it at Theatre On The Lake, a theatre in the same neighborhood as Darger's Chicago studio apartment.
Lo-fi folk singer/songwriter Kate Ferencz of Brooklyn, New York, has written and recorded a song called "Elsie Paroubek," after the girl who inspired Darger's main work.[20]
A punk/shoegaze/surf band from Brooklyn is called the "Vivian Girls."[21]
Jesse Kellerman's 2008 novel The Genius took part of its inspiration from Darger's story.
The artist Grayson Perry cites Darger as "the artist he identifies most with in terms of his creative pathways," and his influence can clearly be seen in Perry's use of visual language.
[edit] Collections and exhibits
Darger’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne), the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Darger’s art also has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including “The Unreality of Being,” curated by Stephen Prokopoff (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1996; Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1997). It was also seen in “Disasters of War” (P.S. 1, New York, 2000), where it was presented alongside works by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya and the British, contemporary-art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Earlier this year, an entire gallery was devoted to Darger’s drawings in “Dubuffet and Art Brut” at the Museum Kunst Palast, in Düsseldorf; that exhibition will open at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole on October 10 (and run through February 1, 2006). Darger’s work has also been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Collection de l’Art Brut. Darger’s art is scheduled to be featured in forthcoming exhibitions at La Maison Rouge (Paris), next year, and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) in 2007.
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