1
Untitled ("We will slam them with our wings")
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper (24 x 106 1/2"). American Folk Art Museum, gift of John and Margaret Robson 2004.1.3a. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: James Prinz.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
2
Untitled (Idyllic landscape with children)
"The Vivian girls are the heroes of In The Realms of the Unreal. In this painting, you can see the Vivian girls shown in the center of the composition. There are seven Vivian girls and they are blonde-headed sisters often wearing Easter dresses with a little bowtie across their chests. Sometimes Darger is so infatuated by the Vivian girl that he makes more than seven of them in his paintings."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper (24 x 106 1/2"). American Folk Art Museum, gift of John and Margaret Robson 2004.1.3b. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: James Prinz.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
3
6 Episode 3 Place not mentioned. Escape during violent storm, still fighting though persed for long distance
"One of the more perplexing and mysterious characters in In The Realms of the Unreal is the transgender figure. There's been a lot of speculation about why Darger would create a transgender figure in his war story. It's likely he was trying to embody masculine powers of warring into his children. In other words, in a male-dominated, gender-specific culture such America pre-WWII, it's likely he somehow intuitively understood that in order for these kids to win the war, which they did, they would have to have that male authority and power to do so."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, and carbon tracing on pieced paper (24 x 74 3/4"). American Folk Art Museum, gift of Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner 1995.23.1 a & b. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: Gavin Ashworth.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
4
At sunbeam creek. Are with little girl refugees again in peril from forest fires. But escape this also, but half naked and in burned rags / At Torrington. Are persued by a storm of fire but save themselves by jumping into a stream and swim across as seen in next picture / Their red color is caused by glare of flames. At Torrington. They reach the river just in the nick of time.
"Darger bound these paintings as books. Their original form was in book form, showing us that they were really illustrations to the novel. They were all taken out of the book form for the first exhibition in 1976. These triptycs were probably mid-career for Darger. We know that he started out smaller and continued to build up and become more confident with his art-making, eventually getting to those iconic 12-foot-long panoramic landscapes."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing and collage on pieced paper (19 x 70 1/2"). Anonymous Gift in recognition of Sam Farber 2004.1.2A. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: James Prinz.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
5
At Jennie Richee Assuming nuded appearance by compulsion race ahead of coming storm to warn their father.
"In this painting, you can see that preoccupation, that fascination with weather and weather patterns. He uses weather to also create an emotion from you, the viewer. For example, in this painting, you'll see that the enslaved children are fleeing. What they're fleeing from is this looming storm of a rolling cloud that he would have seen throughout his life, being a Midwesterner. There is nothing gentle and bucolic about it like we saw with the landscape when we started this tour."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, and carbon tracing on pieced paper (19 x 70 1/4"). American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian in memory of Robert Bishop 2000.25.3A. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: James Prinz.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
6
Gigantic Roverine with Young All poisonous All Islands Of Universan seas and oceans. Also in Calverina Angelinia and Abbieannia.
"This is one of the more spectacular watercolor paintings of one his blengiglomeneans, a made-up word for a made-up species in a made-up tale by Henry Darger. His blengiglomeneans are these wonderfully complex creatures. In fact, in The Realms of the Unreal, all of his characters are pretty complex and compelling creatures. The blengiglomenean in this case is made up of a dragon head with dog ears, antlers on its crested head, lizard-like legs, and a rattle-like tail with butterfly wings."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, and carbon tracing on pieced paper (14 x 33 3/4"). American Folk Art Museum, anonymous gift 2001.16.4. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: James Prinz.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
7
Untitled (Portrait Of Colonel Jack Francis Evans)
"What were looking at here is a small work by Henry Darger. Most of us know Henry Darger's large panoramic paintings done in watercolor, often with collage. This is another kind of expression that he created. We call them his portraits. He made individual portraits of many of the cast of characters. Colonel Jack Francis Evans, an Angelinnian officer, is shown here with his entire contributions to the war written around his portrait. Darger often used words in his compositions to great effect, but also as an informational device, not just an aesthetic device."
About This Work
Watercolor, pencil, ink and collage on board (13 3/4 x 11 1/2"). American Folk Art Museum purchase, 2002.22.5. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: Gavin Ashworth.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.
8
The complete writings of Henry Darger
"Something extraordinary happened when Henry Darger began his artistic career, which began at the age of 19, and that is that he never stopped. He started writing at the age of 19 and we don't believe that he stopped until he died at the age of 81. What you're looking at in this photograph is one man's life work. Thirty thousand pages of text comprised of four different manuscripts, a few novels, an autobiography, and then a ten-year project. To our knowledge he never shared this with anyone."
About This Work
American Folk Art Museum. © Kiyoko Lerner. Photo: Gavin Ashworth.
Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum since 1999, is responsible for the care and cultivation of the contemporary objects by self-taught artists in the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and exhibitions. Brooke is also involved with programming and collaborative initiatives of The Contemporary Center and its special division, The Henry Darger Study Center.
Photographs, image captions, and accession information provided by the American Folk Art Museum. Reprinted with permission.