In a manuscript of more than fifteen thousand pages, Henry Darger created a fantastic world in which children endured wars and disasters amidst magical creatures and flowery landscapes. He accompanied the densely typed pages with around three hundred large-scale, double-sided, panoramic watercolor and collage pieces, assembled in scrapbooks. Many figures were traced, enlarged, or lifted entirely from magazines, comic strips, and other popular media, although Darger often transformed them with imaginative details such as butterfly wings and horns. This monumental work—titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion—was just part of the thousands of pages of text and art he produced and would make him one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century. Yet the work’s fame would come only posthumously, following its discovery by his landlords in 1972.
Most people knew Darger as a hospital janitor in Chicago, where he was born in 1892 and spent much of his life. The trials faced by the Vivian Girls as they waged battles to rescue fellow children who had been enslaved by the violent adult villains he named the Glandelinians may have offered an outlet for his memories of a disrupted and vulnerable childhood. When he was four, his mother died, and by the time he was eight, he was in an orphanage; he later was sent to the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where abuse and neglect were rampant. He finally escaped when he was seventeen.
Although he spent his lifetime working in isolation, emergence from obscurity came quickly after he died in 1973, with the first exhibition of his work held in 1977 at the Hyde Park Art Center. The Intuit Art Museum in Chicago later acquired the contents of his one-room apartment, and the American Folk Art Museum now has the largest repository of his work. Although his sprawling narratives that use myth and metaphor to express a highly personal world have influenced countless artists and are now prized by collectors and institutions around the world, his remains rest humbly in the “poor plot” of a cemetery in the Chicago suburbs, his headstone reading both “Artist” and “Protector Of Children.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
