Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings
by Michael Bonesteel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael BonesteelEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-12
ISBN: 0847822842
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Rizzoli
Book Reviews of Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings
Book Review: very nice
Summary: 5 Stars
I've waited for a collection of Darger's work ever since I first saw a handful of originals on exhibit at the County Museum. This volume has a lot (over 100?) of high quality color reproductions of the Vivian Girls leading the sometimes bloody, cosmic child slavery rebellion against the invading Glandelinians, along with source material, and some interesting shots of Darger's studio/apartment.There are also some pretty interesting writing excerpts from Darger's mammoth source material, REALMS OF THE UNREAL (which dwarfs the notebook writing of David Fincher's antagonists in SEVEN and FIGHT CLUB). It's pretty genuine, and the editors contend to've kept the editing to a crucial minimum.
Tim Burton, et al., can claim to be as weird or on the fringe as much as they want, but they don't hold a candle to someone with a real chemical imbalance.
It's pricey, but well worth it if you're a collector of this sort of stuff. Now, if only someone would make a comparable collection for Adolfo Wolfi...
Summary of Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings
This book provides the first comprehensive survey of Darger's art and writings. Included are reproductions of approximately 114 of Darger's collage drawings and fifteen selections from his writings, focusing on his life's work. In the Realms of the Unreal, which is an account of a cosmic struggle against child slavery unfolding on a planet vastly larger than our own. This battle between the forces of good--led by the intrepid Vivian sisters--and the evil Glandelinian nations, was illustrated and extended in Darger's art, including the mural-size watercolor drawings that represent his mature achievement as an artist.
Michael Bonesteel, a Chicago-based art critic and authority on outsider art, provides an introduction to Darger's work and narrates the Dickensian circumstances of his childhood which, along with his profound religious faith and doubt, shaped his extraordinary sensibility. A true American original, Henry Darger combined an unquestionable innocence with a dark and sometimes deeply disturbing vision to create a body of work of originality and lasting impact.
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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