Thank heaven for little girls

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Richard Vine

In maturity, Darger attained mastery of his most characteristic devices -- tracing clothed figures in such a way as to reveal the naked body beneath, combining right-reading and reversed figures in the same group, repeating identical figures within one scene, whimsically inserting collaged cartoon characters, uniting body parts from diverse sources to form a new composite, and adding tiny penises to many of the girl nudes (though never, it seems, to the Vivian Sisters). Finally, in 1944, he hit upon a procedure that enabled him to more easily evoke spatial depth through sharp disparities of scale. Having picked out a key figure, he would have it photographically enlarged to various sizes (up to about 10 by 13 inches) at a nearby drugstore. He thus built up an inventory of 246 images that could be traced and integrated with the collage elements -- now primarily extreme-perspective cityscapes and combat vignettes -- that had again emerged in his work.

Like many fairy-tales and classics of "children's" literature (e.g., those of Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson), The Realms of the Unreal covertly addresses the problem of evil: how can a perfectly benevolent, all-powerful deity permit suffering and death to exist? This philosophical conundrum marks the modem schism between secular humanists like Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, for whom no spiritual Kingdom, however glorious, can ever justify the unmerited tears of a single infant, and devout religionists, who accept the necessity of evil "on faith" -- either as a logical entailment of virtue (since "good" cannot be conceived apart from it, as St. Augustine argued) or as the occasion for a more wondrous salvation 'God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good,' in the words of St. Thomas). Art historically, the latter paradox is often epitomized in the Slaughter of the Innocents -- Herod's mass killing of Jewish infants in a futile attempt to destroy the newborn Messiah -- a theme having strong affinities with Darger's signature iconography.

Darger himself seems to have vacillated between protest and reconciliation. (Perhaps this instability reflects an internal civil war, the artist's intense struggle to subdue his own Gland-elinian urges. Given his predeliction language, particularly for memorable naming, that term may well have chimed punningly in his subconscious.) Michael Bonesteel has already detailed in these pages [see A.i.A., Feb. '85] what happened when. in July of 1912, Darger lost a newspaper photograph of Elsie Paroubek, a 5-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and murdered the previous year. Rechristened "Annie Aronburg," this angelic child, seemingly a surrogate for Darger's long-lost sister and his own prelapsarian youth, played a major role in The Realms of the Unreal. The artist became so distraught at the loss of her "real-life" image that, after months vainly praying and even building a private altar, he threatened to shift his creative sympathy to the foul Glandelinians. In fact, when his petitions went unanswered, Darger did tip the balance in favor of the infidel hordes, unleashing a massive torrent of slaughter that embraced both kinds of evil as traditionally defined: the natural evil of storms and forest fires, and the moral evil of human instigation war, murder and mayhem).