Henry Darger shown at the Smart Museum of Art

Wednesday, 19 December 2007 00:20

Chicago, IL - For forty years, the self-taught artist Henry Darger (1892–1973) lived and worked in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Teeming with objects of all sorts— from balls of string and Pepto Bismol bottles to coloring books and art supplies—the room revealed Darger’s treasured collections and aesthetic sensibility. In the room, Darger cocooned himself within the imagery of his art, collecting and cataloguing the children’s books, comics, and magazines that he used to illustrate the fantastical scenes of his massive epic known as In the Realms of the Unreal.

Anchored by two double-sided collage and watercolor drawings, Drawn From the Home of Henry Darger will be on view at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, from December 22, 2007 to March 16, 2008. The exhibition also includes excerpts from In the Realms of the Unreal, archival photographs of Darger’s apartment, and a selection of his source materials and art supplies, on loan from Intuit – The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Together, these drawings and source materials give an intimate glimpse into Darger’s working process and artistic achievements.

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, 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 . The story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines—the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight—as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over twenty years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal . He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form “Blengiglomeanean Spirits,” creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, which were stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine.

Drawn from the Home of Henry Darger pairs examples of the artist’s work with a selection of source materials and other objects related to the drawings, including samples of coloring books and paint kits, loose clippings of comics and weather scenes (some with pencil or carbon copy marks left from the process of transferring images), as well as scrapbooks and the negative enlargements Darger made from the clippings. The exhibition reveals the connections between these source materials, the apartment, and Darger’s art, offering an intimate yet exemplary glimpse into Darger’s artistic achievements.

Visit the Smart Museum of Art at : www.smartmuseum.uchicago.edu