1892, Chicago (Illinois, USA) - 1973, Chicago (Illinois, USA)

Henry Darger was four years old when his mother died, giving birth to his sister. The little girl was immediately given to a foster family and Henry would never see her again. When he reached the age of seven, his father sent him to an orphanage, where he suffered from violence and bullying. Later on Henry ended up in an institution for retarded children ; he ran away at the age of seventeen. We know very little about the next phase of his life. It seems that in 1913, he witnessed the total destruction of a city by a tornado. In the early twenties, he was a janitor in a Chicago hospital. He would remain there his entire life, until his retirement in 1963. At the age of nineteen, he began writing a saga that would fill more than fifteen thousand pages in fifteen volumes, abundantly illustrated and entitled : "The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Here Darger describes the combat of the virtuous and immortal Vivian girls, who are helped by Captain Henry Darger, the leader of an organization protecting children against the evil adults, the Glandelinians, who attempt to capture the children in order to induce them to slavery, torture them and assassinate them. Darger illustrated his epic on large sheets of paper covered on both sides, some with illustrations cut out from magazines. These drawings represent little girls (certain with the genitals of little boys) pursued by cruel soldiers, terrorized by devastating tornadoes or deadly explosions. Every figure is enhanced with gouache. After 1946, Darger used photographic enlargements and tracing paper in order to duplicate the same image and create thus entire armies of children, which he symbolically rescued and tried to protect, even if he exposed them later to a number of dangers. The signification of this technique is as ambiguous and complex as Darger’s work. Darger’s production was discovered by Nathan Lerner, his landlord, after Henry asked him to put him in a nursing home. Until then, he lived and created in total anonymity. When Kiyoko Lerner, Nathan’s wife, crossed the path of this bum looking old man returning from church and asked him how he was, Henry, without looking up, responded : "Maybe the wind will stop blowing tomorrow."

SEE ALSO : MacGREGOR (John). Henry J. Darger : Dans les Royaumes de l’Irréel. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne/Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, 1997.