Countless theories on Darger

Director/curator Brooke Anderson is protective of Henry Darger when any discussion of his life turns sensationalist. Picture / Greg Bowker

Of all the artists featured in the Mixed-Up Childhood exhibition, Henry Darger is the most enigmatic. He is the subject of a feature-length documentary which was a finalist in this year's Oscars, and a Hollywood biopic is being developed by screenwriter Mark Andrus (As Good as It Gets), but much of Darger's monumental body of work remains a mystery.

What we do know is that he was born in 1892, and he spent most of his life prolifically writing and painting. He created more than 30,000 pages of material and obsessively amassed files of news-clippings, comic illustrations and a host of other visual references. Central in his career is the massive 12-volume book, which he wrote both in longhand and typed, 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.

To illustrate this opus, comparable to an epic blend of The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan and The Lord of the Rings, Darger drew fantastic scenes of winged warriors, dragons, and horrific battles. Some pictures are so large he would not have been able to unfold them in the one-room Chicago apartment he spent most of his time in when not working as a hospital cleaner.

No one knew of Darger's solitary activities until 1973 when his landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner, inspected Darger's room just before his death and discovered a carefully sorted private archive that would remain a mystery for researchers for years to come.

So vast is the quantity of Darger's output that no one has read it all.

One person who has probably experienced his idiosyncratic vision more than most is Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Centre at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, where most of Darger's work is stored.

Anderson escorted the Darger paintings that feature in Mixed-Up Childhood to New Zealand and is equally protective of the artist when any discussion of his life inevitably turns sensationalist.

"My defensive posture is about trying to show how he was really unsensational in a lot of a ways," she says. "I have people in my family like him, except they don't make art.

"What is remarkable is that he made art but his approach and attitude to living life is, frankly, not that remarkable and it makes me anxious when people try and make it so remarkable."

Darger's achievements are easy to romanticise in light of his background. His mother died in childbirth when he was 3 and his new sister, considered the focus of much of his work, was adopted out. His father went into care soon after, and Darger was sent to an asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, where he remained until he was 19. He escaped and walked to Chicago. When not working, the next 11 years were spent neatly writing out Realms of the Unreal in longhand before typing up a 15,000-page, edited version.

The vivid accompanying illustrations confirm a fertile, complex but sometimes alarming imagination. Most are populated by young girls, often naked and with male genitalia. In epic blood-soaked battle scenes the girls are brutally tortured and killed by armies of men but innocence prevails at the story's end.

Not surprisingly, there are those who assume Darger was a paedophile. Others have suggested he may have been a murderer but a more likely diagnosis is that he was autistic and had Asperger's syndrome, which explains his obsessive nature, difficulty socialising and a fixation with the weather.

It seems every field of study has a theory on Darger. "He reaches out to so many people; the medical community, the artistic community, the literary community, and individuals from all those communities have expressed an obsession with Darger," says Anderson. "That fascinates me as much as the work does itself."

Disability or not, Darger worked with remarkable rigour and consistency throughout his life. He possessed a persistence most trained artists would envy.

"Darger really was able, in his life, to commit himself to making things and I think that's the hardest thing for anyone to figure out how to do," says Anderson.

"I think that's one of the reasons Darger is so popular right now. Because artists look at him and think, would I, should I, could I - a real desire to emulate and a real admiration, and perhaps even jealousy."

Although Darger spent much of his time absorbed in an imaginary world, what he conjured up was far from random hallucinations.

"Darger was pulling [images] from popular media and inserting them into his own art practice and the American Civil War is really the skeleton for In the Realms of the Unreal.

"The American Civil War was partially about ending slavery - it was also a war about economics, too, but the PR was that it was to end slavery. In the Realms of the Unreal was about the fight to end child slavery, there was a north and the south and, in Darger's world, there were the Glandelinians and the Abbiennians. And, interestingly, in a lot of his paintings, he includes a directional north-south-east-west."

Although there are countless theories on the different symbolisms in Darger's monumental body of work, it is the simplest observation that Anderson considers most important: "I actually just find the paintings extraordinarily beautiful - I think they can live for me that simply.

"Obviously, there's a lot more there, but they can satisfy me from a purely formal, aesthetic, beautiful place. Of course, there are many other layers but the fact they can exist on that plane is very potent and very rare. There are very few paintings that have that kind of power."

Exhibition

* What: Henry Darger in Mixed-Up Childhood

* Where and when: New Gallery, to May 29