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Henry Darger is one of the most important Outsider artists of the 20th Century. His oeuvre was only discovered in 1973 after his landlord Nathan Lerner placed him in a nursing home. Lerner uncovered a staggering trove of drawings, collages, watercolors and manuscripts that the artist had created over the course of approximately 50 years. His major work is a fifteen-thousand page written and illustrated story 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. He also wrote an eight-volume autobiography consisting of 5,084 hand-written pages as well as a nine-year-long study of the weather.
A major work, While inside they await developments... is a large-scale double-sided watercolor of collaged paper from his epic tale, an imagined war between two fictional groups of young girls, the Angelinian and the Glandelinians. As can be seen in the following three works (lots 71-73), Darger's protagonists (and their male accomplices) are shown in innumerable situations, from sweet interior scenes of children playing to the most violent and gruesome tortures.
In addition to Darger's bold use of color, jarring compositional designs and intricate methods of working, his subject matter speaks to a contemporary artworld that is fixated on children or child-like imagery. Contemporary artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshimoto Nara regularly depict children, with a Dargeresque undercurrent of mystery and foreboding.
Darger has recently been the subject of major exhibitions, including a traveling retrospective that was shown at the American Museum of Folk Art in 1997 and Disasters of War: Francisco de Goya, Henry Darger, Jake and Dinos Chapman at P.S. 1/MoMA in 2000-2001. There have also been a number of major monographs published recently, including Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings (Rizzoli, 2000) and Henry Darger: In The Realms of the Unreal (Abrams: 2001).
PROPERTY FROM THE ROBERT M. GREENBERG COLLECTION
HENRY DARGER (1892-1973)
At Sunbeam Creek/At Wickey Sansia
Details
HENRY DARGER (1892-1973)
At Sunbeam Creek/At Wickey Sansia
double-sided: watercolor, graphite and collage on paper
18½ x 36 in. (47 x 91 cm.)
Painted circa 1950-1960.
At Sunbeam Creek/At Wickey Sansia
double-sided: watercolor, graphite and collage on paper
18½ x 36 in. (47 x 91 cm.)
Painted circa 1950-1960.
Provenance
Nathan Lerner, Chicago