Art out of mind. - Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, by John M. MacGregor; The Art of Adolf Wolfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann - book review

Art in America, June, 2003 by Sue Taylor

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, by John M. MacGregor, New York, Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002; 736 pages, $85.

The Art of Adolf Wolfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann, New York, American Folk Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, New Jersey, and Marquand Books, Seattle, 2003; 112 pages, $29.95.

For a long time now, John MacGregor has been consumed by his extraordinary biographical subject. Holing up for months at a time in the small room on Chicago's North Side where the reclusive Henry Darger lived from 1947 until his death in 1973, MacGregor combed through drawings, diaries and thousands of typed and handwritten manuscript pages, immersing himself in the artist's bizarre world. Fifteen years in the making, MacGregor's monumental Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal confronts us with the full complexity of the oeuvre, exposing its sinister dark side as well as its more familiar, charming aspects. Since their discovery by the artist's landlord, the well-known photographer Nathan Lerner, the scroll-like watercolor and collage drawings of Darger's imaginary Vivian Girls have been widely exhibited; the writings, in contrast, remain obscure and little understood. (1) MacGregor takes his subtitle from Darger's magnum opus, a 15,145-page, typed, single-spaced epic recounting the role of the seven Vivian sisters in the horrific Glandeco-Angelinian War. In seven crudely hand-bound volumes and eight loose volumes tied with twine, using various sizes and kinds of paper and colored typewriter ribbon, Darger chronicled a conflict over child slavery among great make-believe nations--the cruel Glandelinia and its God-fearing Catholic neighbors, Angelinia, Abbieannia and Calverinia.

An expert on the contested category of "Outsider art" and author of The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (1989), MacGregor gives us the details of Darger's lonely life. Born in Chicago in 1892 to a German immigrant tailor and his American wife, Darger suffered a series of disasters in childhood. His mother died shortly after giving birth to a daughter when the future artist was three; the baby, he was told, was given up for adoption. Unruly at school, Darger was placed in a Catholic orphanage and, in 1904, removed to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln. He would never see his father again: Darger senior died in a home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor in 1908. The conditions Henry endured at the asylum, as MacGregor discovered from the contemporaneous report of a state-appointed special investigating committee, were horrendous. After five years of neglect and, MacGregor suspects, sexual abuse, the boy escaped.

Darger spent the rest of his life working menial jobs in Chicago, disappointed when, poor and unmarried, he was unable to adopt a child of his own. That wholly unreasonable and desperate desire, unsatisfied despite years of prayer, suggests a tentative grasp on reality, but Darger was not, as records at the Lincoln asylum mistakenly described him, "insane." In what is perhaps his most exciting and revelatory contribution, MacGregor offers a psychiatric diagnosis, suggesting that Darger suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism occurring almost exclusively in boys. Drawing on Darger's autobiographical manuscript, History of My Life, as well as his creative work, institutional and employment records, and reports of individuals who knew him, MacGregor makes a convincing case that the artist's "intellect was essentially unimpaired by his disorder, but that ... his ability to relate to others emotionally and socially was severely disturbed." Darger's extravagant imagination, extensive knowledge of Civil War history, fascination with meteorology (for 10 years he kept a daily weather journal)--as well as his overwhelming preoccupation with little girls--informed his clandestine 60-year production of the illustrated narrative In the Realms of the Unreal.

Assessing Darger's enormous output, MacGregor declares him a genius. Along with his own detailed discussion of text and images, MacGregor incorporates long passages from The Realms, replete with misspellings and grammatical errors, as well as lavish reproductions of the drawings and of Darger's source materials--newspaper photos, cartoons, comic and coloring books. MacGregor shows how the resourceful artist, not adept at drawing freehand, devised a set of strategies we might call bricolage to realize his visions. His techniques included collage and tracing with carbon or wax paper. Beginning in 1944, to solve problems of scale, he relied on his local drugstore for photographic enlargements of pictures clipped from magazines. MacGregor dubs Darger's appropriations "art by adoption," comparing the found images of little girls to orphans, rescued from the trash and redeemed by the artist. This apparent tenderness, however, represents only one aspect of Darger's disposition toward children. Importantly, MacGregor also reveals, in greater detail than ever before, the sadistic nature of the artist's pictorial fantasies, in which little girls are beaten, burned, hanged, crucified, strangled until their eyes and tongues pop out, dismembered and eviscerated.