The Secret World of an Outsider Artist (Spring 2006)

Untitled
(Idyllic landscape with children) (detail) Henry Darger (1892-1973).
Chicago, Illinois; mid-20th century, Watercolor, pencil,
carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper. Collection American
Folk Art Museum, New York. © Kiyoko Lerner.

Henry Darger, c. 1970. Photo: David Berglund. Photo courtesy
Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago

Grayson
Perry: The Artist and His Muse
A
social misfit himself, artist Grayson Perry draws
inspiration
for his pottery from the unconventional art
work of outsider artist Henry Darger.

In 2003, when
artist Grayson Perry dressed in drag, smiled, and posed
for photographers in the galleries
of the Tate Britain in London, he said momentously, “It’s
about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize.” (Britain’s
premier art prize.) Perry, who when dressed in drag answers
to the name Claire, was inspired to begin exposing his
life as a transvestite after seeing Henry Darger’s
drawings in a 1979 exhibition of outsider art in London.
It was then that Darger became, and remains, Perry’s
favorite artist.
A native of Chicago, Darger’s hometown,
The Warhol’s
John Smith, assistant director for exhibitions, was familiar
with Darger’s work for many years before it burst
on to a wider stage, and he believed Perry’s interest
in the old man was worth exploring. The end result is
the exhibition Grayson Perry, which is showing at The
Warhol
through April 30 concurrent with Henry Darger: Highlights
from the American Folk Art Museum. While Perry’s
work is well known throughout Europe, this is his first
museum appearance in North America.
Since Darger lived
such a hidden life, ignored and uncelebrated, Perry’s
interest in him may seem a little surprising. Yet, according
to Smith, Perry isn’t the only contemporary
artist to ever find inspiration in Darger’s work.
“
Perry stands for a number of contemporary artists
who have found Darger to be a rich source of inspiration,” Smith
says. “In fact, it was Darger’s illustrations
that inspired Paul Chan’s video Happiness [(finally)
after 35,000 Years of Civilization-after Henry Darger
and Charles Fourier, 2003-2004], which appeared in
the most
recent Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum
of Art.”
Initially, Perry may have
been motivated by a neurotic fear of a fate similar
to Darger’s,
but that is certainly not the destiny he has been
dealt. Recognized as an artist
for the past 20 years, Perry’s work has been
celebrated since winning the 2003 Turner Prize. Unlike
Darger, his
life has been one of openness and revelation, even
unto self-promotion. He has
said that he became a potter for economic reasons:
he was broke, without a studio, and pottery classes
were
cheap.
He makes his own pots (they are coiled, rather than
thrown), and each is a technical tour de force.
Perry’s
pots are decorated with drawings that can easily
evoke Darger on occasion. Images are superimposed,
collage-like, on a bleak landscape, very often reminiscent
of the
childhood
landscape of his native Essex (an archetypical run-down
suburbia).
Unlike Darger, the perversion
in Perry’s
work is more explicit and undoubtedly shocking. His
first ceramic
bore the words KINKY SEX, and since then he has not
held back. On successive vessels the perversions
and fetishes
of
suburban life, mixed with the intuitions of psychoanalysis,
mean that the viewer should approach Perry’s
pots with caution. They are like grenades projected
into the
art world and into the galleries of wealthy private
collectors: ironical improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) tailored for
sophisticated urban life.
A clay pot does not have the aura
of fine art. It is a social misfit, an outsider. So,
also, is the transvestite.
In Grayson Perry’s
work, the political agenda of the artist takes a clear,
witty, and ironical shape. Henry
Darger might well be surprised at the ball he set rolling.

Back

The Secret World
of an Outsider Artist:
An exhibition currently
on view at The Andy Warhol Museum reveals the prolific and
eccentric work of Henry Darger, an artist unknown to the
world until his death in 1973.

By Graham Shearing,independent art
critic
Nobody knew
that the old man, who had lived almost all his working
life as a janitor in Chicago hospitals, as a tenant in
a grubby one-room apartment, and, at the end, under the
watchful care of the Little Sisters of the Poor in a home
for the aged, had kept a momentous secret. This was Henry
Darger (1892-1973), who never had even his allotted Warholian
15 minutes, but whose fame is quickly reaching a tremendous
climax. It is only now, 33 years after his death, that
his work can be seen at The Andy Warhol Museum in the exhibition
Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art
Museum.
Outsider artists commonly live the creative part of their
lives hidden from the world, only to be discovered and celebrated
in old age or after their deaths. Darger is considered an outsider
artist, which means his work falls outside the traditions of
art making. Often, the mad or the dysfunctional, or the untrained,
primitive artist finds a home in this genre. Outsider art catches
us off-guard with its raw, sometimes strange, and often unrefined
insights.
Darger is best known for his hundreds of odd watercolor
drawings of young girls, soldiers, and dragons set in picturesque
landscapes,
which are often threatened by tornadoes, or disrupted by
warfare or other acts of unexpected violence. Simply and colorfully
illustrated, the illustrations, which can be up to nine feet
long, double-sided, and stiff with adhering collage, were
once
bound up together accompanied by 30,000 pages of text, including
the masterpiece he titled The Story of the Vivian Girls,
in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian
War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. If not for
the scale of the work, the strangeness of the accompanying
story’s content, and the enormity and consistency of
the vision, Darger’s drawings would be nothing special.
The Lonely Misfit
Darger experienced what can only be described as a horrible
life. His mother died in childbirth when he was 4. His only
sister was adopted and totally lost to him. His father placed
him in an orphanage at the age of 8, and he spent his adolescence
in an asylum, declared weak-minded. As a child, he witnessed
a traumatic tornado in his hometown just outside Chicago,
which was to haunt his memoirs and his art. As an adult in
Chicago, he barely
scraped by on his janitorial pay.
Right: Study
Of Vivian Girl With Doll,
Watercolor, carbon tracing, and pencil on paper. Collection American Folk Art
Museum, New York. © Kiyoko Lerner.
Descriptions of Darger indicate
a cantankerous misfit, scavenging from dumpsters, disconcertingly
dressed. However, he appears
to have been a devout Catholic and a regular at mass.
When
he became too frail to navigate the stairs to his apartment,
Darger handed over its entire contents to his landlord
and submitted himself to the care of the Little Sisters of
the
Poor to await death. And yet, from that single-room apartment
emerged one of the world’s most distinctive artists.
We know what Darger wrote and how he wrote it. His autobiography,
which is 5,000
pages long, and other matter found in his apartment—all
equally as obsessive — constitutes a formidable archive,
much of which is housed in the Henry Darger Collection at
the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Andy Warhol,
at
one stage of his career, sat on the board of the Folk Art
Museum, and his own collection of folk art was once exhibited
there.
We also know how Darger constructed
his remarkable pictures.
In fact, his methods of working are the principal reason
why he attracted the interest of The Andy Warhol Museum.
John Smith,
The Warhol’s assistant director for collections and
research, aware of the connections between Darger and Warhol
and recognizing
other interesting technical parallels in their work jumped
at the opportunity to bring Darger’s work to Pittsburgh. “
Warhol himself had a very distinctive method, which has
a great deal in common with Darger’s,” says
Smith. “Both appropriated the work of others,
particularly illustrations and advertising material, which
was not necessarily regarded as art. And, like Warhol,
Darger was a pack rat, exhibiting unusual collecting obsessions
beyond the material that fueled his art. For Warhol, it
was cookie jars; for Darger, empty Pepto-Bismol bottles.”
A
curator once warned Warhol of the risks of duplication;
for Darger, duplication was his lifeblood. Although Warhol
was a highly accomplished artist, he devised
simple
methods of copying images such as tracing, reversing images,
and photographic enlargement. Darger, claiming no graphic
skills, reproduced his images by similar methods.
Both
reproduction and enlargement dilute the affective quality
of the original image. But Darger’s little girls, whether
traced or collaged onto his drawing paper, make a virtue
of their monotonous duplication. Armies of clones are the
unexpected result. The formula is unceasing, the repetitive
pattern
and
succession of bright, flat coloring—which imitates
lithographic reproductive methods—echo Warhol’s
own banal use of color and design.
Simple Methods, Complex
Art
While much of Darger’s work, at first glance, appears
to have much in common with a child’s coloring book
(Warhol also produced such things), it has no such recipient
in mind,
and beware the parent that introduces such work to his
or her child.
Left:
At 5 Norma Catherine. but are retaken, Henry Darger (1892-1973),
Chicago, Illinois; mid-twentieth century, Watercolor, pencil
and carbon tracing on pieced paper. Collection American Folk
Art Museum, New York. © Kiyoko Lerner.
There is an obvious theme to Darger’s
drawings that is violent and perversely sexual. The sequences
of little girls
that he illustrates with such obvious relish are often
naked and equipped with penises. This has given rise to
complex psychosexual
theories about Darger’s private life.
Scenes of
violence, young girls brandishing guns, and soldiers
throttling girls against a background of threatening
skies
(that tornado again) contrast with sylvan landscapes,
brilliant skies, banks of flowers, and the innocent
play of children.
It is as if a hellish Apocalypse has come to visit
a rural kindergarten. Theories abound that attempt to explain
Darger. It has been suggested that he was a child murderer
because newspaper
clippings of a particular incident were found among his
papers,
but there’s
no evidence of that. In fact, his life offers no evidence
of perversion of any kind. Yet his drawings seem to demand
an
explanation.
Students of the art of the insane, a very
distinct sub-category of outsider art, often see work
of this kind. But for
art like this to have been created outside of the walls
of
an asylum
and within the secret places of our contemporary cities
may make us all catch our breath.
Smith takes a broad
view of the artist: “The beauty of
Darger’s work is that it lends itself to so many
interpretations. In the absence of any statements from
Darger himself that might
offer interpretative clues or signposts, we are all—curators,
art-historians, dealers, critics, psycho-historians,
and the public—completely free to read Darger’s
work according to our own intuitions and self-interests.”
One
thing is surely certain: had Andy Warhol lived to
continue his own obsessive habits, at least one
watercolor
by Henry
Darger would have entered his collection. Smith also
speculates that had Warhol never gone to Carnegie
Tech or to New York,
his impulse to create might well have resulted in
work not unlike that of Darger.
The ‘definitive’ exhibition
of Darger’s work
is on view at The Warhol until April 30, although Smith
stresses: “Consider
the fact that Darger’s work has only recently
been accessible. It’s clear that there remains
a tremendous amount of research still to do.”

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