Categories
Oddities

Henry Darger

I was listening to Natalie Merchant’s album, Motherland, which in general I didn’t find too interesting *, when I came across a curious song called Henry Darger.
Turns out that Henry Darger was a solitary man, whose artwork and writings were discovered only after his death, when his landlord came to clean out his apartment.
Henry Darger art (detail)
Darger wrote and illustrated an epic fantasy story called 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’s considered a prime example of what is called “Outsider Art”.
The idea of someone obsessively writing and drawing a story meant only for himself reminds me of Robert Crumb’s brother in Terry Zwigoff’s film Crumb.


* – In most of the songs she sounds too much like Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading, which weren’t to my taste back when you couldn’t escape hearing them; Though I did enjoy the songs Golden Boy, St. Judas and This House Is On Fire (particularly the opening).