Thank heaven for little girls

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Richard Vine

The Realms of the Unreal takes place on an unnamed planet, 1,000 times the size of our own, which has the Earth as its moon. Here the evil Glandelinians practice child slavery, seeking to extend their dominion over a rival nation -- the Christian, child-protecting Abbiennia. At the center of these hostilities are seven blonde Abbiennian princesses, the Vivian Sisters (daughters of the Emperor Vivian), perpetually aged five to seven and always matchingly dressed (or undressed). The wax lasts four years and seven months, and involves armies of stupendous size -- casualties in individual battles often run into the millions -- as well as natural cataclysms such as lightning storms, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and forest fires (all of which the heroines interpret as the work of their enemies). The Vivian Girls, whose lives oscillate between periods of bucolic enjoyment and terrifying peril, always manage -- by wit, charm and the grace of God -- to escape from their frequent captors and to elude death. Not so their female coevals: many are vividly throttled, hacked, hung, shot, burned or blown up. Occasionally the nymphets are protected by good dragons, caused called "Blengins," which can be as much as 45,000 feet long with immense multicolored wings. (These sexually suggestive creatures have piercing tongues which can inject young girls with an immortalizing liquid; in some cases, the two species apparently merge, producing humanoid females with large curling horns and expandable dragon tails and wings.) In the end, the goodly Abbiennians prevail, and the girl-children settle into a blissful existence amid fields of oversized flowers.

Darger's illustrations share many piquant qualities with his text. Landscapes are sweepingly composed, specific environments -- from dark caverns to sweet domestic interiors to tumultuous battlefields -- are convincingly rendered, perspectives shift freely from wide-angle inclusiveness to one-point visual thrust, figures congregate in almost elastic-seeming clusters, gestures rhyme and repeat among characters, colors (from glowering sides to florid gardens) set strong emotional tones. In addition to laying down unbroken watercolor washes of astonishing length, Darger can impress with subtler touches, too: like differentiating earth, flesh, trees and sky with four shades of gray, or incorporating far distant individuals and groupings into the overall pulse of a battle scene, or depicting tropical trees through a seamless blend of drawing and collage.

Darger's freehand draftsmanship is "primitive" in its lack of modeling, and he could afford only the cheapest materials -- low-grade paper and watercolor sets of the sort meant for schoolchildren. Yet these limitations clearly spurred his inventiveness, as his production methods underwent a three-stage evolution. By 1918, when Darger was 26 and World War I was nearing its end, he had begun cutting portrait photos of soldiers, officers and statesmen from newspapapers and magazines in order to transform them -- using high-contrast, often dark-toned, washes applied directly to the surface -- into military characters out of The Realms of the Unreal. These images, like his partially collaged renderings of Blengins, were confined to one side of single sheets and often accompanied by lengthy captionlike texts. Later, he relied more heavily on traced figures which could then be grouped into complex patterns and filled in with a greater delicacy of coloration. Narrative considerations came to the fore in this second phase, prompting Darger to paste individual sheets together into chronological strips or extended multi-action panoramas. Portraits gave way to broad, deftly orchestrated scenes, while incorporated texts shrank to a few handwritten lines.