The Art of Henry Darger Creepy Artist Eastern Europe
Inspiration
Children Confronting Sinners: The Marginal Creativity of Henry Darger
Henry Darger worked as a cleaner in a hospital in Chicago for his unabridged life, and his neighbors knew him as a foreign man. Shortly before Darger's death, it turned out that his apartment was filled non only with garbage, just also with hundreds of creepy pictures — illustrations to a book most a rebellion of children against the adults who enslaved them. Today, Darger'due south work is bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he is considered to exist one of the master representatives of American naive art.
Henry Darger was born in 1892 in Chicago. His mother died when he was four; his male parent barely went outside because of his own health bug. At iv, Henry went shopping and did household chores by himself. The family barely made ends meet, so Darger's younger sister was sent to an orphanage — co-ordinate to the creative person's memories, he saw her simply in childhood.
At school, Darger painted rather well and took an involvement in the American Civil War. Despite his academic success, his teachers didn't like him — he often corrected their mistakes. His classmates had a problem with his 'provocative' behavior — every bit Darger later recalled, during classes and breaks he made 'strange sounds' with his olfactory organ and mouth.
Because of Darger'south behavior, the school doctor diagnosed him equally mentally disabled and sent him to a special home for children that was located in another state. According to Jim Elledge, the creative person'south biographer, the staff at the abode would frequently vanquish children. According to another researcher, John MacGregor, at about the same time the home was in the centre of a scandal: the dr. there supposedly used the bodies of children who had recently died to teach anatomy to students. The memories of living in the dwelling house would later exist featured in the artist's volume.
Henry Darger. The photograph was taken in 1971, two years before the artist's expiry. Photo: Wikipedia
In 1900, Darger'south gravely ill father was placed into a Catholic mission, where he shortly died. Henry constitute out nearly it from a letter. Grieving, he became aristocratic and didn't talk to anyone for several weeks.
Darger tried to run abroad from the children's home. Once, he was caught by shepherds at a farm where students worked during the summertime holidays — he was then tied to a horse and fabricated to run later information technology for several kilometers as a penalization. The second fourth dimension, he jumped onto a freight railroad train, merely got afraid of the thunderstorm, and surrendered himself to the police at the nearest station.
Finally, at 16, Darger, together with two other children, succeeded in running away from the farm, and after several days ended up in Chicago. For some fourth dimension he worked some odd jobs, until he got employed at the Catholic hospital as a nurse's aide — he would go on to work there for fifty years.
Girls and Guns
Shortly afterward he started working in his new place, Darger also started writing a novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal. The action unfolds on an imaginary planet (according to Darger, a satellite of the World), in the country of Glandelinia where children insubordinate against the fallen Catholics who enslaved them. The uprising is headed past 7 girls — Violet, Joice, Jennie, Catherine, Hettie, Daisy, and Evangeline, helped by a dragon. The 4-yr war ended with the children victorious, but at the cost of a loftier mortality rate.
The artist based his characters on existent life, and sometimes were directly borrowed from The Wizard of Oz or Uncle Tom's Motel. Darger pays special attention to the war scenes: he fifty-fifty creates the marches that the sides play when they become out to the battleground. In a special notebook, the writer counts the fallen heroes and war machine equipment used during the battles.
In a special notebook, the author counts the fallen heroes and armed forces equipment used during the battles.
Darger never learned to draw, and then he was looking for his own techniques to create an prototype. At first, he 'created' collage: cutting out silhouettes of people from newspapers, magazines and children'south coloring books, glued pictures on paper, and covered the result with paint. When Darger discovered that cut out and looking for fitting sources took a lot of fourth dimension, he inverse the process and started making stencils.
He created a total of nearly 300 illustrations for the Vivian Girls. He painted some of the pictures on both sides on three-meter canvases.
Image: Anonymous gift in recognition of Sam Farber © Kiyoko Lerner / James Prinz
Image: James Prinz
Image: Museum purchase © Kiyoko Lerner / Gavin Ashworth
Image: Museum buy © Kiyoko Lerner / James Prinz
You lot Won't Like It
Darger'south creative work is characterized past his ability to combine naive sentimentality and excessive cruelty. In her book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Fine art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing draws attention to the fact that Darger's characters always accept a martyr-like, compassionate, or indifferent gaze. The combination of horror on the faces of the tortured girls and indifference in the optics of their torturers leaves a heavy impression on the viewers.
The combination of horror on the faces of the tortured girls and indifference in the eyes of their torturers leaves a heavy impression on the viewers.
The artist'due south 'martyr' works are and then expressive that in 2000 his work was exhibited together with Goya'southward engravings from the armed services series at the P.Due south.1 contemporary art center in Queens at the Disasters of War exhibition.
Because of such involvement to the theme of violence and a reclusive lifestyle, some critics speak about a possible mental disorder of the artist. Psychologist John MacGregor considered Darger a serial killer who restrained his urges, getting the energy for his creative work from them. Afterwards, nonetheless, MacGregor softened his diagnosis, and said that the creative person had Asperger's syndrome — people with this disorder feel trouble communicating and are interested with a limited number of topics.
Non everybody agrees with this arroyo: for case, Michael Moon thinks that there is no excessive aggression in Darger's work. In his opinion, the artist borrowed the scenes with excessive anatomical details from Scripture. Moon thinks that assailment in Darger's work does not indicate mental issues, but a business firm grasp on Christian literature that he consciously used when criticizing Catholicism.
Reconstruction of Henry Darger'due south room at the Chicago Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 2008. Photograph: Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photo / East News
The work tabular array of the artist: Charles Male monarch Arbogast / AP Photo / East News
Trash and Decay
According to the neighbors, in the terminal years of his life Darger turned into a strange man who talked to himself or to people that he thought were in the room. He took trash from the street dwelling: erstwhile newspapers, boxes, twine that he would spend hours unbundling in his apartment. He left the infirmary and lived on welfare; he spent about of the money on enlarging the negatives that he would paste into his pictures.
Darger took trash from the street dwelling: old newspapers, boxes, twine that he would spend hours unbundling in his flat.
Sometimes Darger asked his neighbors to purchase him soap or shaving foam for Christmas. Except for these infrequent requests, the artist barely talked to everyone. His country deteriorated, the entries in his diary became shorter. In 1972, the neighbors placed him in a care home at the St. Augustin's Catholic mission. That was when the house owner, Chicago photographer Nathan Lerner, found his work. He decided to clean the apartment of its trash, and in add-on to a hundred bottles of laxative, plastic figurines of Jesus and Mary, weird balls and a phonograph, Lerner found the pictures and the manuscript.
Image: Gift of Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner © Kiyoko Lerner / Gavin Ashworth
Photograph: James Prinz / Kiyoko Lerner
He visited the creative person several times and tried to talk about his piece of work. Darger said that it was besides late to do something about them and asked the business firm owner to destroy everything. Later, co-ordinate to Lerner, the artist allowed him to proceed the work. When Darger died after a twelvemonth, Lerner took the pictures home, despite his wife existence against it. And when the photographer died in the belatedly 1990s, the rights for Darger's legacy were inherited past his widow.
Today, Henry Darger is considered to exist ane of the most popular American outsider artists. His novel remains unpublished, but simply the one work, At Jennie Richee, Escape During Arroyo of New Storm, was sold for $350,000 at Sotheby'southward in early 2019.
Darger died in 1973, and was buried at the cemetery for the poor in Chicago. On his tombstone, his fans wrote that he was an artist and a protector of children.
Source: https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/20191226-henry-darger-art-brut.html
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