"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-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.[2] The visual subject matter of his work ranges from idyllic scenes in Edwardian interiors and tranquil flowered landscapes populated by children and fantastic creatures, to scenes of horrific terror and carnage depicting young children being tortured and massacred.[3] Much of his artwork is mixed media with collage elements. Darger's artwork has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art."
Dude spent his entire life locked away in his room drawing and writing. What do you think?
I think it's a shame he didn't take some Loomis in there with him
>>2600818
https://youtu.be/MSzzirIP0No
A trailer for a great documentary about him, I can't find the full version of it now tho
proto /ic/
worse than 35% of /ic/
A gallery near me actually has his work and before I even read more about him I was drawn to his art. There's just something so otherworldly about his composition. Like an adult child creating his version of epic masterpieces. The weirdest thing is that he was actually highly intelligent, just very hermitlike.
"Henry Darger (1892-1973) spent much of his life in Chicago rummaging through trash cans, going to Mass, writing about the weather and fighting with tangled balls of twine. When he died, he left an apartment filled with hundreds of old Pepto Bismol bottles; plastic maple syrup containers; balls of string; a windup Edison phonograph; a music box, and plaster figurines of Jesus and Mary. That was not all.
''Where there was any wall space, and tacked around every door frame, were pictures of little girls that had been cut out of magazines, newspapers and coloring books,'' Michael Bonesteel writes in ''Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings,'' to be published by Rizzoli in November. There were pictures of the Dionne quintuplets, some 20 pictures of the Coppertone Girl and many pictures of Little Annie Roonie."
>>2600836
Two trunks held a lifetime of writing: a 5,000-page, eight-volume work titled ''The History of My Life,'' which included thousands of pages on a single tornado; a weather journal covering exactly 10 years, from Dec. 31, 1957, to Dec. 31, 1967; and a series of diaries detailing how many times he went to Mass and his many tantrums over twine.
The biggest surprise was a creepy, obsessive 15,000-page manuscript typed in different colored inks. It was called ''The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal of the Glandico-Angelinian Wars, as Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.'' And it had an 8,500-page sequel, ''Further Adventures in Chicago.''
The Vivian girls -- Violet, Joice, Jennie, Catherine, Hettie, Daisy and Evangeline -- are the heroines of ''The Realms.'' They unite with gentle, child-loving dragons called the Blengiglomenean Serpents (Blengins for short) in a four-year--seven-month war (fought sometime between 1910 and 1917 and roughly following the outlines of World War I) against the Glandelinians, a race of fallen Catholics who enslave and torture children. In the end, the girls prevail and so do the Catholic nations of Abbieannia, Angelinia, Abyssinkile, Protestentia and Calverinia, but not before many children are tortured and killed.
>>2600838
"If Darger had left only the text, he might be just another forgotten recluse. But he also made 300 illustrations -- everything from small watercolors to 12-foot-long mural-size scrolls, often painted on both sides.
Darger crammed his huge, fantastical landscapes with baby-faced girls, some clothed in colorful dresses, bathing suits and pinafores, and others naked. He equipped certain girls with horns and others with penises; he showed some being disemboweled or strangled, tongues lolling out, and he drew others enjoying the sunshine, the butterflies and the huge flowers. The girls' eyes, as John MacGregor, a pre-eminent Darger scholar, has pointed out, shine in the dark because Darger filled them in with pencil lead."
Amongst other things he kept a journal in which he wrote every day for 10 years, tracking the weatherman's weather predictions and mocking him for being wrong
He also, in a rare spur of interaction with people told the husband of his landlady that he was raped by a beautiful 17 year old italian girl
>>2600844
>Amongst other things he kept a journal in which he wrote every day for 10 years, tracking the weatherman's weather predictions and mocking him for being wrong
Haha what the fuck
>He also, in a rare spur of interaction with people told the husband of his landlady that he was raped by a beautiful 17 year old italian girl
Implying
>>2600818
If you are impressed with tracing and analog photobashing then go ahead. More knowledgeable people will pass.
What can you possibly know about art or life if you don't get laid regularly?
I doubt that anyone ever was actually impressed with the quality of his artwork, but the imagination behind it
but this is fucking /ic/ what did I even expect
Very interesting, but where can I even find this book to read? The only torrents are for the documentary
>>2601062
His book has never been published unfortunately. There's a book about him though.
>>2601062
Also his art has often a sort of 3D quality the scans don't capture. Eg. He would make the eyes "shiny' with pencil and make the edges of collage appear in a way that is pleasing to the eye
He applied twice to adopt children, but was refused. His biggest dream was to adopt a child.
>>2601076
That is regrettable, awful lot of pop-culture references to his work by people that haven't read it.
Fingers crossing that someday someone as nuts as him will try to transcribe everything into a set of books (can't be too hard, library of congress already does this), or that I can somehow sit myself down in one of the archives and read them first hand.
Best thread of the year so far, my all time favourite artist.
This is some very high level autism and also a great thread
>>2600818
>drawing lolis before drawing lolis was cool
But on a series note, Jesus fucking Christ, this guy was not right in the head
>>2600836
This pic gave me the keks
Really his only notable achievement was being discovered before the internet made it clear that there are millions of unskilled people obsessively drawing and writing massive amounts of low quality material. These days he'd just have a deviantart account.
>>2601486
He kinda reminds me of this guy on da who wrote thousands of pages of his weird fanfiction involving dexters lab or something
I believe he's on da
>>2601455
>drawing loli traps
Fixed
>>2602042
baiting while saying tagging your post with ''bait''
that's some baitception going on here
unless you unironically expect us to like this shit, in which case, kys my family
>>2600840
>like every /if/ artists today will have the same fate as him
>>2600883
His stuff looks amazing though
"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, for 43 years, that Darger imagined and wrote his massive tomes (in addition to a 10-year daily weather journal and assorted diaries) until his death in April 1973 in St. Augustine's Catholic Mission home (the same institution in which his father had died). In the last entry in his diary, 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..."
"The large part of the book, 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, follows the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a daring rebellion against the child slavery imposed by John Manley and the Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology includes the setting of a large planet, around which Earth orbits as a moon (where most people are Christian and mostly Catholic), and 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 benevolent, but some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian atrocities."
Once released from the asylum, Darger repeatedly attempted to adopt a child, but his efforts failed. Images of children often served as his inspiration, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News from May 9, 1911: a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek. The girl had left home on April 8 of that year telling her mother she was going to visit her aunt around the corner from her home. She was last seen listening to an organ grinder with her cousins.[15] Her body was found a month later in a sanitary district channel near the screen guards of the powerhouse at Lockport. An autopsy found she had probably been suffocated—not strangled, as is often stated in articles about Darger. Paroubek's disappearance and murder, her funeral, and the subsequent investigation, were the subjects of a huge amount of coverage in the Daily News and other papers at the time.
>>2603749
This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive of clippings Darger 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. 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."[18] According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his locker at work was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. Because he couldn't remember the exact date of its publication, he couldn't locate it in the newspaper archive. He carried out an elaborate series of novenas and other prayers for the picture to be returned.
The fictive war that was sparked by Darger's loss of the newspaper photograph of the murdered girl, whose killer was never found,[19] became Darger's magnum opus. He had been working on some version of the novel before this time (he makes reference to an early draft which was also lost or stolen), but now it became an all-consuming creation.
>>2601086
I was in Baltimore on business about 20 years ago and spent an afternoon at the American Visionary Museum. They happened to have just put up the first major installation of Darger's work. So lucky to have seen it in person. Magical & majestic madness, I'm telling you.
