I haven’t written tons on this blog about the sort of art that is hung in galleries (just about 3 dozen posts, most with some sort of connection to our usual beat of show business), but this story is too extraordinary to go unremarked upon.

Outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973) died 50 years ago today, and his is a rare case when someone’s death is as significant as their birth. In his case, his death occasioned the birth of his…celebrity? Notoriety? For that was when Darger’s landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner went in to clean out his Chicago apartment and discovered a treasure trove of some of the strangest, most unique art ever created. Darger’s works consists of A): a 15,145-page self-illustrated fantasy novel titled 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; B) a 10,000 page sequel starring the same seven characters, the Vivian Girls, Crazy House: Further Adventures on Chicago; C) a 5,000 page “biography” called The History of My Life, almost all of which consists of fantasy fiction about the impact of a tornado named “Sweetie Pie”; D) assorted diaries and fragments, including a 10 year meteorological diary; and E) hundreds of watercolors, drawings and collages designed to illustrate the books, which he displayed museum style around his apartment, along with found objects he got off the street and from garbage bins. He had begun developing this material in near total isolation since 1930 — when he was 38 years old.

Because Darger has been gone for such a long time, biographers, scholars, curators and art historians only have a certain number of clues to go on about what made him tick, and there are several, pretty major, unanswered questions. That he was mentally ill there is zero doubt, although (as is sadly too often the case) there is no way to sort out whether his maladjustment was due to nature or nurture, as his circumstances were so extraordinary. He was raised by a single, crippled father in extreme poverty. Yet he skipped several grades in grammar school because he was plainly gifted. When his father became an invalid, Henry was sent to a Catholic orphanage where he was cruelly treated by both the staff and the students for his eccentricity. Apparently he had a habit of making involuntary noises, and was punished for masturbating, among other things. The nuns sent him to live at the Illinois Institute for Feeble Minded Children, from which he eventually escaped. The entirety of his working life was spent at a Catholic hospital, where he was employed as a janitor and dishwasher. He normally attended mass several times a day, and had a kind of religious shrine in his apartment. And he lived the bulk of his life in near total isolation.

The principal question most people have about Darger concerns a murdered five year old girl named Elsie Paroubek. Darger was obsessed with her, kept her picture from the newspaper, and after the picture was stolen from his locker, prayed for its return. This has caused some to wonder, quite naturally, what his interest was. Did he do it, or did her plight simply touch his heart? He seemed somewhat too interested. Darger was 19 years old at the time of Elsie’s 1911 murder. He had attempted several times to adopt children through the usual avenues, and had been naturally rejected. With a friend he had discussed founding a “Children’s Protective Society”, and his art is all about torture and cruelty to children (and their efforts to get free of it). Some have argued that this is a natural response to his upbringing. But it’s also well known that abused children often become abusers. So some have wondered if he was a pedophile or even a child-murderer. This isn’t to damn or gossip or defame the dead. It’s a logical question; persecution would lie in presuming to answer it with nothing concrete to go on.

An entirely unrelated question concerns Darger’s sexual orientation. The main reason this question gets raised is that Darger seems to have drawn many naked “girls” with penises. Yet because of his extraordinarily sheltered upbringing, that fact by no means implies a same sex attraction necessarily. It’s entirely possible that he was as ignorant as that of female anatomy. He was never known to have had any sexual partner, male or female.

On top of the fascinating psychological stuff, and the religious themes and so forth, Darger’s works interest us as a reflection of his times, isolated though he was from them. His drawings were largely traced from magazine advertising, comic strips, and the like, and the fantastical plots, though heightened and warped, seem to draw from popular children’s literature and Hollywood movies. In the end, this is a story of a man who got deep, deep, maybe too deep into the world of his own imagination. Yet his invented universe has things in common with Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, the abused children in Dickens, the heroines in D.W. Griffith, and the martyrdoms of Medieval saints. Produced in monk-like isolation by someone who was both a victim and a figure of mystery.

In the 50 years since, Darger’s works have been exhibited around the globe, and he has been a muse and an influence upon many a subsequent visionary, not just visual artists, but also writers, and musicians. Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago has even re-created his room. It sure would be cool if society could figure out ways to do things for people while they were still alive, though!