The Selling of Henry Darger

An obsessive art historian devotes a decade to the works of a reclusive -- and controversial -- artist.

The topic was Henry Darger's penises; or, to be more precise, his penchant for putting them on little girls.

"I know he knew the difference between boys and girls," the chubby man in the audience was insisting. "Don't you agree?" --San Francisco art historian John MacGregor, who had just finished one of his rare lectures -- this one at New York's American Folk Art Museum -- on America's most famous psychotic artist, gave a bland smile.

"Well, of course we don't really know ..."

"But I do," the man insisted. "I can just feeeeel it."

It's the kind of conversation you tend to hear when MacGregor talks about his study of the work of Henry Darger. Study is a weak word -- the Princeton scholar has lived it for the last 10 years, spending months in the Chicago room where the reclusive Darger wrote his phantasmagorical psychosexual epic.

Epic, too, is a poor word choice. Darger's "book" is doubtless among the longest ever written, running 15,145 pages in all -- single-spaced, typed, legal-size pages, mind you -- not including the hundreds of accompanying watercolors, some as long as 10 feet, depicting a world that looks something like The Wizard of Oz as seen by a pedophile on a bad acid trip.

It's pretty strange stuff. But since Darger began receiving national attention, the whole thing has taken on an entirely new dimension, with purist art scholars and Hollywood producers politely going toe to toe over the image of a hermit who never showed his work to another soul.

But let's start with Henry Darger.

Darger lived the life from hell. He was born in 1892. His mother died in childbirth when he was four, and he lost his father soon thereafter. By age 12 he'd become one of the 1,500 inmates of a notorious asylum in rural Illinois. His admission records listed his disease as masturbation.

Normally Darger would have spent the rest of his life in the institute. But in 1908 he escaped to Chicago. He worked as a hospital janitor for the next 50 years, a friendless loner whom neighbors knew only as "Crazy," the old man rummaging through their garbage. His only known social activity was Catholic mass, which he attended as often as four times a day.

Finally, in 1972, unable to walk up the steps to his apartment, he was put in a poorhouse to die. But when his landlord, Chicago artist Nathan Lerner, went to clean the room where Darger had lived for 32 years, he discovered under hundreds of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles and thousands of balls of broken string a 12-volume illustrated novel that Darger had spent his life writing.

It's called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. It's the story of the Seven Vivian Sisters, "blonde little girls of great beauty and supernatural goodness and armed with amazing courage and military genius" who, with help from friendly dragons and butterflies, lead the war against the child-hating Glandelinians. Millions of little girls are disemboweled and tortured, but in the end good triumphs. The artwork consisted of enormous watercolor tableaus, simultaneously naive and incredibly violent, in which hundreds of naked girls with male genitals fight for their lives against grown-up soldiers.

Lerner had stumbled on one of the greatest works of "outsider" art ever. In its short public life it has been hailed as a masterpiece and criticized as child pornography. Its creator has been called a possible serial killer. His work has been shown at major venues such as San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (last fall the museum presented "Henry Darger: The Unreality of Being"). Its value is estimated in the millions.

No one knew this would happen back then in 1972. Indeed, until Lerner found it, no one had known of the work's existence. When Lerner and his wife, Kiyoko, asked Darger what he wanted to do with it, he mumbled, "It's yours" -- among the last words anyone ever heard him speak.

It's about here that MacGregor enters the picture. The upper Castro resident is an odd fish, academically (he declined to be interviewed by the Bay Guardian for this article and has similarly refused other publications). He has a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton and has studied psychiatry extensively, including stints with Anna Freud and at the Menninger Institute. He does not, however, hold a degree in any psychiatric field. His business card reads simply "Psychology of Art."

All of this makes the quiet professor, whose dramatic lectures have made him a sought-after speaker on the international art circuit, eminently qualified to be one of the leading scholars in the growing field of outsider art, a term loosely applied to artists, many with mental conditions, who operate outside the accepted realms of the art world. He has written one of the field's seminal works, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, and his presence in the Bay Area has helped make it one of the nation's centers for the study of the form.

"He's been wonderful for us, sort of an in-resident scholar," said Irene Ward Brydon, director of Oakland's Creative Growth Art Center, the nation's first gallery devoted to art by people with mental conditions. "I know his book on [Dwight] Mackintosh was a catalyst for the kind of fame that [Mackintosh] now has."

Mackintosh is one MacGregor's better-known case studies. Now 96, Mackintosh came to the Creative Growth Art Center after 56 years of institutionalization and began drawing wildly whirling figures. They attracted immediate attention, according to Brydon. But it wasn't until MacGregor's study of him, The Boy That Time Forgot, (MacGregor donates all proceeds from the study to the center), that Mackintosh became the international art celebrity that he is today.

Art created at the center is not "art therapy." Instead, its artists produce work that is sold as outsider art, one of the fastest growing markets in the commercial field today. According to Brydon, 5 to 15 percent of the center's funds come from these sales. Mackintosh's paintings, which have been given solo shows all over the world, go for up to $5,000. Darger's larger works are estimated to be worth well over $100,000.

MacGregor functions in this world as a historian-critic of sorts, using both his art and his psychological training to understand the meaning behind these artists' work. MacGregor has made it clear, however, that mental illness is not his primary focus. "Genius," he has said, "is the same whether it appears in a person who is suffering from a disease like schizophrenia or someone who is not." He believes that perhaps 10 "schizophrenic masters" have been discovered, including Mackintosh and Darger, people whose artistic genius is matched by psychiatric problems that render them incapable of communicating to the world except through their art. It is to the study of this rare combination, in which the creative act is arguably at its purest, that MacGregor has devoted a large portion of his life.

Though his colleagues express frustration over MacGregor's obsessive perfectionism, it seems to stem from identifying perhaps too strongly with his subjects. "Such encounters with another mind ultimately involve deep confrontation with one's ... own fantasies ... and with the dark forces which lie within," MacGregor said at a recent psychiatric conference.

MacGregor became part of the Darger story on May 7, 1986, when a gallery owner introduced him to Lerner, apparently with the hope that he would talk the landlord into selling some of Darger's work.

"She apparently didn't know me very well," MacGregor said at the New York lecture. "Otherwise she would never have brought me there."

MacGregor instead convinced the Lerners to keep the collection intact for research purposes. MacGregor then set out on 10-year odyssey through the life of Henry Darger that brilliantly mingled art criticism, psychoanalysis, and detective work.

MacGregor's technique of studying Darger echoed what he did with Mackintosh. Mackintosh is severely developmentally disabled, allowing MacGregor to observe him working for hundreds of hours without interfering with his process. Darger's death, of course, made it impossible to use the same method. So instead MacGregor used Darger's incredibly detailed diaries to "watch" unobserved as the artist created his alternate world.

He discovered that, surprise, surprise, Henry Darger was obsessed with little girls, a pathology apparently stemming from the fact that his little sister was taken away after their mother's death. It was images of little girls that Darger was seeking as he rummaged through his neighborhood's trash cans, and his room contained literally thousands of pictures of prepubescent children.

"Every lost girl that was found by Henry found a home," MacGregor said in a lecture at the University of Iowa. "His collection was a lifelong rescue operation."

His obsession did not end there. Although Darger had no friends, at one point he hooked up with a gentleman named William Schloder and formed the Children's Protective Society. The two of them petitioned the authorities to let them adopt a young girl and were furious when they were turned down.

So Darger brought his girls to life, using the pictures from the trash cans as a base for illustrating the book he was writing. His favorites were the Coppertone Girl, of whom he had 20 copies, Little Orphan Annie, and Little Annie Roonie circa 1929, who appears hundreds of times in his paintings.

He started by merely altering the captions to fit his novel's story line. Then he began coloring the figures in, later using them in traditional montages.

Darger's "late style" works, the ones that have made him famous, were made by tracing these same figures, removing their clothes in the process, and having them photographically enlarged at a nearby druggist.

Then he traced them again into a gorgeously colored but sometimes frighteningly sadistic landscape, according to MacGregor, "releasing the children ... and with every stroke, revealing more and more of himself."

To Darger these were much more than paintings. One of the many puzzling things visitors to a Darger show notice is that the girls' eyes are entirely filled with lead pencil. MacGregor discovered the reason for this one night while meditating in Darger's room. The paintings were hanging on the wall, as they had when Darger lived there. Sitting in the dark, MacGregor noticed that passing lights were reflecting in the lead-filled eyes of the pictures, giving the impression that the pictures were actually alive and watching him.

"It's no exaggeration to say that Darger loved these children." MacGregor has said. "They were his family."

If Darger's visual art has received national attention, the text to Realms of the Unreal remains largely unknown. There are only two copies in existence, and no one, including MacGregor, has read the entire thing (about half of the work is supposedly in MacGregor's possession in San Francisco). MacGregor has called it Proustian and a classic of outsider writing. Others have praised what they've read while noting that it vacillates from passages of childlike innocence and beauty to violence that makes de Sade look like Milquetoast.

The impact of spending 10 years on and off reliving Darger's life has, according to MacGregor, left him "changed." He refers to Darger by his first name. He also spoke to "Henry" while working in Darger's room, which has been kept as it was when the artist lived there.

His days of unlimited access to the estate, however, seem to be coming to an end. Kiyoko Lerner, who took control of the Darger estate when her husband died last year, has recently donated almost 20 of the artist's major paintings to the Collection de l'art brut in Switzerland, all of which will be displayed in a new wing dedicated to Darger.

The room where MacGregor communed with "Henry" is scheduled to be dismembered, perhaps to be moved to the new building for the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, where it will serve as a base for scholars studying Darger's work, according to Kiyoko.

It also appears that MacGregor's plan to edit a digest version of Realms of the Unreal for publication is in question.

"I'm not so sure that it will occur," Kiyoko Lerner said in a phone interview. "[MacGregor] is not easy to work with, and at this point I have no patience with John," referring to the 10 years MacGregor took to complete his book. It's a length of time and an attention to detail that borders on the obsessiveness of Darger himself, although there's no denying that 20,000-plus pages of writing is a lot to deal with.

MacGregor's study, however, is now finished and, appropriately enough, is the longest work on an outsider artist ever written -- 1,200 pages, a length he jokingly refers to as stemming from Darger's influence.

But don't expect to see it in print anytime soon, because despite the intense interest in Darger's story, no publisher has agreed to print it unless MacGregor makes substantial cuts, something he is reportedly unwilling, or unable, to do.

Instead, you might be seeing the movie first. Kiyoko Lerner has agreed to sell the rights to Darger's life to Hollywood producer Michael Besman (The Opposite of Sex, Seven Years in Tibet). Though the project is still in its early stages, Lerner has met with a potential screenwriter, Mark Andrus.

"I did not want someone who would make a mockery of [Darger's] life," Lerner said. "We discussed his approach, and he convinced me that he would treat Henry as an artist, not someone to make fun of."

The choice of Andrus, who cowrote the screenplay for As Good as It Gets, is impeccable Hollywood logic: if he can turn one reclusive eccentric artist (played by Jack Nicholson) into Oscar gold, why not Henry Darger?

There is, of course, a significant difference between a character obsessed with avoiding pavement cracks and one fond of undressing images of little girls and slapping penises between their legs.

"You mean how would I address the little girls with the penises?" Besman asked from his car phone during a recent interview. "I probably would not be addressing that in detail. I'm not interested in that story."

Which brings us back to the gentleman's question at the beginning of this story -- what gives with the penises? MacGregor, who has said that that was one thing that drew him to the project, devotes an entire chapter of his book to the question. He seems inclined to believe that Darger didn't know girls had genitals different from those of boys. (Interestingly, his book on Mackintosh comes to the same conclusion.) In lecture comments he has indicated that Darger found "what he knew or wished to be there."

According to Besman, his movie would take a less Freudian approach than MacGregor's study did.

"To me the story is about the human condition and how Darger used his imagination to survive and get through his life," he said. It would focus on his whole life -- the institutionalization, escape, and creation of Realms via animation of Darger's images.

"I think he was a very brave guy just to exist," Besman said. "Whatever came out in his work was because he missed his little sister."

The question Besman might have to deal with is, Why make a movie that some will inevitably see as either glorifying a pedophile or violence against children?

It's a situation Bonnie Grossman of Berkeley's Ames Gallery, which specializes in outsider art, dealt with before when she discovered a San Francisco artist named A.G. Rizzoli.

"It was a great concern of mine with Rizzoli," she said.

One of Rizzoli's major works (he does a unique type of "architectural" painting) was a piece commemorating the time he saw the genitals of a three-year-old girl. It's titled The Primal Glimpse at 40. Grossman actually tracked down the girl in question, 25 years later, to find out if Rizzoli had done anything improper. The answer was no, and today the painting is worth an estimated $100,000.

"There was no basis for suggesting any [pedophiliac] behavior on his part," she said. "And I understand the same is true of Darger."

MacGregor's refusal to cut down his study on Darger does not surprise Grossman. The same situation came up when MacGregor did an essay on Rizzoli for a book on the artist. When the editors wanted to edit it, MacGregor withdrew the piece rather than let it be cut.

"He's a character," she said of MacGregor. "I've had my differences with him."

Like Grossman, MacGregor attempted to discover if Darger had victimized anyone and in the course of his inquiry stumbled on one of the more bizarre tales in the annals of modern art.

Although Darger collected thousands of pictures and photographs of young girls, MacGregor discovered that there was one photo of which he had been especially fond. It was a newspaper photo of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old girl who was strangled in Chicago in 1911, about two years after Darger escaped from the asylum.

According to MacGregor, Darger identified Paroubek with his sister. He even wrote Paroubek into his book as a character. In 1912, however, Darger lost her photograph. He searched frantically and then began beseeching God to return the photo. He even built an altar to her.

Finally, in a fascinating transgression of the line between fantasy and reality, he began threatening God that he would empower the evil Glandelinian army were the picture not returned, as per this diary entry:

"October, 1912: Prediction and Threat: Despite the new situation in the war [in the Realms] petition [return of photo] must be granted before March 21, or change will come in favor of the enemy. H.J.D."

The picture remained lost. Darger left the Catholic Church in disgust (in real life) and Realms at this point turned into bloodbath. "Even little girls, from the ages of nine, eight, and even younger, were tied down stark naked and a spade full of red hot live coals laid on their bellies," Darger wrote in it. "Scores upon scores of poor children were cut to pieces, after being strangled to death.... Children were forced to swallow the sliced fragments of dead children's hearts.... Their protruding tongues were extracted." In the end 56,789 children were killed, their hearts hung by strings to the walls of houses.

The violence was finally resolved when a character named Colonel Henry Darger joined the Vivian girls to defeat the evil army.

MacGregor had once stated that Darger "possessed the mind of a serial killer," a statement for which he was widely criticized. He has since clarified his position to indicate that he does not think Darger had ever murdered anyone because, as a pathological obsessive, he would have been unable to stop once he had killed.

But the outburst of violence over the loss of Paroubek's photo and the apparent blur between reality and unreality has recently led MacGregor to speculate that Darger may actually have been responsible for Paroubek's murder. (The case was never solved.)

"I was forced to confront the possibility that at the age of 19, having just escaped from a psychiatric institution, he could have been the killer of Elsie Paroubek," he said in remarks at a recent psychiatric conference in Madrid, Spain. MacGregor seems to have few qualms about the character of his subject: "Would I have undertaken my study ... if I had believed him to be a murderer of girls? Yes."

Though MacGregor has also said that he has never found any direct evidence of Darger killing or attacking anyone, his comments trouble other art historians.

"A comment like that sensationalizes the genre [of outsider art]. It confuses the artistic importance of the work with sexual and criminal overtones," said Stephen Prokopoff, director of the University of Iowa Art Museum, who curated a version of the Darger show that came to San Francisco. "Everyone who is familiar [with the situation] laughs at the idea -- not to say that John is not a serious scholar -- he's a brilliant scholar -- but he got an idea in his head and just won't let go."

In fact, Macgregor and Prokopoff squared off when Prokopoff censored the more violent images from the show that later came to Yerba Buena. He defends the act by saying that he "wanted to show that Darger was not an ogre ... and I honestly thought they [the violent ones] were just not as good." MacGregor criticized it as a reduction of Darger to another "cutesy and quirky" folk artist.

Speculation that Darger might have been a child-murderer certainly won't make Besman's job of raising Hollywood money any easier. To compound matters, Besman has never spoken to the man who perhaps knows Darger best, because, according to Besman, MacGregor refuses to speak with him.

"Oh no, you know, I'm like Mr. Hollywood!" Besman said. "But as far as I know Darger was not a pedophile. I think it's terrible that people say those kinds of things without any real evidence."

In the end, speculation -- and John MacGregor -- are the only tools we have for understanding Darger's personality and creations, because, as MacGregor points out, we are as ill at ease in the secret, obsessive world of Henry Darger as he was in ours. "The thing to remember is that he never tried to show his work," MacGregor has said. "We're now the outsiders in Henry's world."