Henry Darger In The Realms of The Unreal
By John M. MacGregor
Delano Greenidge Editions, New York, numerous black-and-white and color reproductions, 720 pages, 2002. ISBN-0-929445-15-5

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum
By Brooke Davis Anderson, with an essay by Michael Thevoz
American Folk Art Museum and Harry N. Abrams, New York, many color plates, 128 pages, 2001. ISBN-0-8109-1398-4

It is testimony to Henry Darger’s isolation that his most extended intimacy with another human being probably happened after he was dead. We now have the fruit of that intimacy: John MacGregor’s authoritative 720-page study Henry Darger In the Realms of the Unreal.

A Canadian art historian and psychotherapist who made his name with his 1989 book The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, MacGregor spent a dozen years wrapped up in Darger’s voluminous writings and art — and in his actual living space, on Webster Avenue in Chicago. His fascination with Darger and awe at his genius obviously kept him engaged, but also fed his unease at Darger’s weirdness. While raw artistic talent made Darger’s work magnificent, his life, its troubles and eccentricities, made what he did with his talent problematic. On the one side is beauty. On the other is not just odd behavior but abject horror.

Darger’s pictorial accomplishments, which mix delicate innocence with extreme violence, have been widely known for years. Now, with this book and Michael Bonesteel’s Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, his written work is finally gaining similar exposure. The texts provide important context for the pictures while representing an immense achievement in their own right — physically, in their thousands of pages, and intellectually, in their originality.

MacGregor presents the writing in small doses via numerous excerpts, making them somewhat more approachable than the longer passages in the Bonesteel book. Both books demonstrate that Darger’s writing, though not as immediately appealing as his pictures, contains the same flashes of creative fire. Even with his unpolished grammar and often-childlike descriptions, Darger displays great clarity and invention.

“Only now, after he is gone, is the richness of his being unfolding in the world, in ways and to an extent he could never have imagined — and never desired,” MacGregor writes. The recent publication of not two but three books, also including Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum, is the ultimate revenge of “Crazy,” as he was dubbed in his youth.

MacGregor ascribes a “near hallucinatory intensity” to Darger’s creative process that could be taken to corroborate that label, but there also is a self-awareness and lucidity that may surprise those whose understanding of Darger pigeonholes him as an eccentric loner. Among other striking excerpts: