Henry Darger

Henry Darger (1892-1973) was in many ways a classic self-taught, “Outsider” artist (though some critics dislike this classification). He was completely unknown until after his death, when his landlord and landlady discovered thousands of pages of writings and paintings in his little room. Most of the paintings illustrated a 1500-plus-page novel that he called In the Realms of the Unreal, in which brave children fought evil soldiers or cavorted in gardens with rainbow-winged creatures in imaginary lands. Darger’s art, which used figures of children from newspaper stories, advertisements, and coloring books as models, is a strange mixture of the idyllic and the violent.This book is the ideal answer for those who have become curious about Darger’s art, perhaps from seeing the documentary film about him (also called In the Realms of the Unreal) that was made in 2004. It features more than 200 full-size, full-color pages of his work, including several fold-outs that illustrate the murals he pasted together. It also includes a long essay by Biesenbach that gives information about Darger’s life and art, including descriptions of a number of other artists who either were inspired by Darger or have done work that shares characteristics with his. There is also a short description of the room that was his home and studio for many years and the complete text of an autobiography that he wrote in later life.I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to make the acquaintance of a peculiar but obviously very talented artist and the strange fantasy world that he inhabited.

This beautiful book provides an excellent overview of the work of Henry Darger. His output was so massive that only a massive volume could do it justice. Excellent scholarship and crisp, beautiful color plates bring this astonishing artist to light. To think that he did created his panoramic compositions using only inexpensive watercolor sets combined with his own templates based on coloring books, comic books, magazines, and the like is just astonishing. Darger is one of the preeminent "Outsider" artists, along with such luminaries as Adolph Wolfli and A.G. Rizzoli. Their work shows that artists outside the mainstream have every bit as much to offer us as academically trained professionals.

Excellent, strange, and disturbing.