Customer Reviews

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum

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I must admit that before i picked up this volume, i wasnt certain of the answer to the aforementioned question. I knew about him, had read bits and pieces about him, but did not know the full scope of his talent.

This book allows the reader to see not just his art, but to catch a glimpse of the sheer magnitude of his madness/genius. The art work is brilliantly reproduced (seeing his stack of journals made the book worthwhile for me).

If you are at all interested in seeing the work and a glimpse of the life of one of the outsider art masters, i suggest that you pick up this book at once.

This was published to go with the large Henry Darger retrospective in New York and has all the great drawings (which are huge) reproduced. Darger had such a unique vision and there is so much detail in his artwork. Is he a genius? Yes!

there is no question, henry darger is not a genius. the fascinating visual effect of his pictures is not contrived, it is the real result of an extremely neurotic man. but that's what makes these pictures so hard to forget.

to put them in context, almost all of the known works of henry darger are a part of the same epic narrative project. the drawings are accompanied by a 5,000 page plus text, telling the story of the vivian girls.

darger was not very good at drawing figures, so he traced photos and cartoons he clipped from magazines and newspapers. supposedly he once lost the newspaper photo of a kidnapped girl that he had been using for one of the main characters, and this forced him to write into the story a search for her. he was so frustrated by this loss that he cursed god and exhibited some sort of religious tantrum.

it is very interesting to look at his pictures and speculate on how each one came to be. i saw one in a museum, which had four cowboys on horses, positioned in a diamond formation, each lasoing a little girl. the space created is distorted like an optical illusion, with spots collapsing and overlapping in ways that do not make sense, so that you can see one object appears in front of another in one spot but behind it in another.

these pictures might give you nightmares or cause seizures.