Description:
The voluminous works of Henry Darger were discovered after his death in 1973 by his landlord in a crowded and almost derelict apartment on Chicago's Northside. Among the piles of newspapers, magazines, and hundreds of balls of twine were scrapbooks made from telephone books and an entire lifetime of creative work. Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings is an amazing window into the extraordinary world of this outsider artist. In order to escape his unhappy childhood in a mental institution and his reclusive adult life, Darger created his own salvation in the form of an intricate fantasy world of drawings and stories revolving around a set of little girl heroines, with vivid watercolors and collages of children engaged in battles against their enemies. The images are violent and strange, yet they achieve a fragile beauty. His work has taken a long time to gain attention in part due to his disturbing "obsession with little girls ... as hermaphrodites with small penises--and worse, a significant number of works that graphically depicted the strangulation, evisceration, and wholesale slaughter of children." Beyond the graphic nature of the artwork is a story that intertwines religion, superstition, loneliness, and bravery. This remarkable book offers the chance to take a journey through the life, mind, and creative process of a true artist, and it includes entries from his personal diaries and chapters from his fictional saga, "In the Realms of the Unreal." --J.P. Cohen
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