Henry Darger
1892, Chicago, IL – 1973, Chicago, IL
Floral imagery and references appear over and over in Darger’s work. Two of the Vivian girls, Violet and Daisy, are named for flowers.
– Debra Kerr
Henry Darger was a native Chicagoan who spent part of his youth consigned to an “Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children” in Lincoln, Ill. As a young adult, he returned to Chicago, where he got a job as a janitor and lived a mostly-reclusive life in a one-room apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Upon his death, Darger’s landlords discovered something incredible: a striking 15,000-page graphic novel entitled In the Realms of the Unreal. The story chronicles the seven Vivian Girls, who led a bloody rebellion against the child slavery of the evil Glandolinean Army.
Floral imagery and references appear over and over in Darger’s work. Two of the Vivian girls, Violet and Daisy, are named for flowers. Several of Darger’s large format compositions present the Vivian girls in landscape settings that include an array of colorful flowers. These compositions were created with the use of source materials, which were central to Darger’s process. He carefully selected, often having enlargements or reductions made, and traced images (from sources such as the coloring book pages) and reconfigured them to create new compositions:
images of young girls frolic among giant flowers, plants from different temperate zones appear together in unusual proportions. Found and gathered images of young girls playing and engaging in daily activities became inspiration for the Vivian Girls and children in his narratives, set frequently in scenes of nature, embellished by flora.
In spring 2000, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art took possession of the contents of Darger’s living and working space, which was installed as a permanent exhibition in 2008. Intuit’s Henry Darger Room Collection includes tracings, clippings from newspapers, magazines, comic books, cartoons, children’s books, personal documents, and architectural elements, fixtures, and furnishings from Darger’s original room. For more information, visit http://www.art.org/henry-darger-room-collection/
Debra Kerr, Executive Director, and Alison Amick, Curator, Intuit
Poppy
Botanical Name: Papaver nudicaule
Common Name: Iceland Poppy
Family: Papaveraceae
Native Range: subpolar regions of Europe, Asia and North America, and the mountains of Central Asia
Aster
Botanical Name: Aster
Common Name: Aster
Family: Asteraceae
Native Range: Eurasia and North America
Zinnia
Botanical Name: Zinnia elegans
Common Name: Zinnia
Family: Asteraceae
Native Range: Southwestern United States to South America
