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Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, by John M. MacGregor
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Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal is a generously illustrated book that represents the culmination of more than a decade of research into the enigmatic artist's life and work by world renowned outsider art expert John MacGregor. The long awaited monograph is MacGregor’s first English-language publication on Henry Darger and the most comprehensive critical investigation of Darger’s writings and illustrations available in any language.
Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. Shortly before his death in 1973, his landlord, Chicago artist Nathan Lerner, made a startling discovery in his tenant’s room: the history of another world in fifteen volumes, In the Realms of the Unreal—at 15,145 type-written pages, possibly the longest work of fiction ever written. In startlingly vivid detail, Darger’s Realms recounted the role of seven sisters, known as the Vivian Girls, in a violent conflict over child enslavement on an unnamed planet. Amidst the refuse, Lerner also found three huge bound volumes of brightly colored illustrations for the work, many painted on both sides and some over twelve feet in length. In the decades since his death, Darger’s alternate universe has attracted the intense interest of collectors, critics, and scholars around the world. His illustrations and writings have been the subject of major museum exhibitions in Europe and North America.
- Sales Rank: #2320934 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.98" h x 12.00" w x 9.34" l, 7.81 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 720 pages
Review
"'Henry Darger' is an improbable, wrist-wrecking page turner, and John MacGregor is, in a profound sense, a mystery writer." -- Village Voice, April 23, 2002
"A book that is part academic magnum opus and part mystery thriller." -- San Jose Mercury News, June 9, 2002
"It is a masterpiece. Empathetic and sophisticated." -- Dr. Leo Navratil, July 2, 2002
"MacGregor's book is tremendously rewarding for its many excellent color reproductions and its always fascinating, sometimes brilliant insights." -- Art on Paper, May-June 2002
"One is in deep waters here, where precedents--William Blake? Lewis Carrol? Balthus?--are remote and few." -- The New Yorker, January 14, 2002
"This is the best book we will ever have on the most important artist we almost never had." -- The Village Voice, December 11, 2002
From the Publisher
Henry Darger is not yet a household name, however it may become one soon. Darger is considered to be the most important figure in the emerging field of Outsider Art—the name given to work by self-taught and often mentally disturbed or otherwise marginal artists. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal is an affordable, accessible, and comprehensive selection of illustrations, images, and texts drawn from the elusive artist’s darkly imaginative private world. John MacGregor’s accompanying text breathes crucial insight into Darger’s life and work and sheds new light on the artist’s disturbing visions. This book is destined to become a milestone of both art historical and psychoanalytic literature.
About the Author
John MacGregor is a Princeton-trained art historian who has devoted his career to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatric art and the related fields of art brut and outsider art. In addition to Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, MacGregor’s books include The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton University Press, 1989), Dwight Mackintosh: The Boy Who Time Forgot (Creative Growth Press, 1992), and The Vivian Girls (Sakuhinsya, 2000. Available in Japanese only).
Most helpful customer reviews
34 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Of art and other demons.
By Angry Mofo
Henry Darger was a lonely old man who lived by himself in a small room in Chicago. He worked as a janitor all his life and went to church several times every day, but he never talked to anyone, so no one even knew how to pronounce his last name. When he died, his landlord went to clean out his room. There he discovered Darger's secret life work - around 300 paintings, and 30,000 pages of writing, including a 15,000-page long novel called "In The Realms Of The Unreal."
It takes a brave man to spend ten years to research such an obscure figure. Apparently John MacGregor was the only man up to the task. This book is the only comprehensive analysis of Darger's life and art in existence.
There's a lot to analyze. Darger's novel describes a horrifically violent world war, fought in an unreal world by the virtuous Catholic nation of Angelinia and the evil atheist nation of Glandelinia. Darger's real life was monotonous and isolated, but his inner life was a war, described every night for sixty-odd years with fanatical devotion. Most of his art depicts destruction. And his main symbol of Christian virtue is seven angelic little girls, whom he loves with suspicious passion. It is unnerving, to say the least.
MacGregor attempts to simultaneously describe Darger's life, critically appraise his art, understand his theology, and explore his psychology, while presenting numerous samples of Darger's work. This is the only such attempt ever made, so this book gets a good review almost by default. But I want to point out a few things about Darger's art and MacGregor's treatment of it.
MacGregor uses many superlatives to describe Darger, like "amazing," "astonishing," "brilliant," and "genius." But when he attempts to discuss Darger's writing in detail, the resulting impression is exactly the opposite. He calls Darger's writing "autistic," states (accurately, judging from the samples) that Darger was incapable of creating convincing dialogue and characters, and points out the incoherence of Darger's invented geography. Then sometimes he calls it "brilliant" in the same breath, and argues that Darger's novel is still very readable and interesting.
If it is, MacGregor's chosen samples don't do a lot to show it. Sometimes Darger could describe a sharp image, or affect the tone of an epic poet or a Bible prophet. But it's impossible to know if this is really a sign of creativity, or just a random aberration. In 15,000 pages, one can find evidence to support any interpretation.
Even when Darger writes something relatively good, one never knows if he really wrote it, or if he copied it from somewhere. MacGregor shows that Darger frequently borrowed whole passages from other works, like Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress." To MacGregor, this is a sign of brilliance. Maybe it is brilliant, for an autistic outsider. But I don't want to patronize Darger in that way, I want to try to approach his art as art first. Unfortunately, such an approach does invite the conclusion that the Realms are basically unreadable.
Maybe this is MacGregor's fault. He states, for example, that Darger could occasionally depict more complicated characters, like the honourable enemy general Izner Myletze. If this is true, it speaks in favour of Darger's writing, and is worth discussing. Unfortunately, MacGregor cites only one excerpt from the novel to prove it, and never returns to this issue again.
MacGregor suggests that one day, the novel might be published in abridged form, and appreciated by the general public. This seems impossible. There's no way to know what to abridge. The Realms have a dramatic situation, but no plot development. MacGregor himself says that the war remains unresolved until the last page of the novel.
The paintings stand up much better. Darger wasn't good at free-hand drawing, so he invented a kind of collage technique, carefully explained by MacGregor, in which he would trace stock human figures from books and magazines, and insert them onto his landscapes as he saw fit. He then coloured them in accordance with his setting, adding military uniforms and weapons. The landscapes themselves were of his own creation.
This technique is more impressive than it sounds. As in the novel, nature plays an active role in the paintings. The human figures are often caught under wild, threatening skies. The clouds come in all kinds of shapes, always gigantic, overwhelming the people. Darger's sense of scale makes nature into a colossal force.
Even the human figures, plundered from disposable popular sources, are turned entirely to Darger's purpose. Sometimes he can use them to create a feeling of motion, like in the one scene where the Vivian girls are running down a railroad track, pursued by enemy forces. And sometimes he comes up with a striking visual image, like the one on the cover of this book, or the one of the heart of Christ in heaven.
Then, of course, there are the violent paintings. There are only about ten of these, but the violence is completely unhinged. The most frightening painting of this sort depicts a massacre in a snowfield, where nature is deathly silent. This is the most distasteful aspect of Darger's art. Though maybe we shouldn't be too quick to call him crazy - isn't Mel Gibson making millions out of basically the same thing?
MacGregor argues that Darger was a great artist in his own right, but after reading this book, one feels that Darger can never be recognized. And this is depressing. It makes one think that art is useless. Darger's life-long commitment to his art basically destroyed his life, even as it motivated it. He was a very unhappy man. And although this book makes a powerful impression, when it's over, one is somewhat glad to get outside into the sunshine.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
The Creation of An Alternate World
By K. Dain Ruprecht
As fans of The Simpsons should know, "Outsider Art" is art that is made by a hillbilly, a mental patient, or a chimpanzee. Anyone who is interested in art like this should know about the great Henry Darger. His story is fascinating, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply disturbing, on all levels. The image on the cover of this book is one of the best examples of what Henry Darger is all about. Huge disembodied flame-colored hands hover menacingly over a group of little yellow-haired girls cowering in their beds. One is running away screaming. Another peers up in cool curiousity... Darger's cult of fame is based on the mega-voluminous epic he wrote throughout his solitary life, based on the often incredibly violent adventures of his imaginary "heart's darlings", The Vivian Girls. Choking and disemboweling were particular obsessions with Darger, and the "battle scenes" can be very hard to look at. Really, keep this book AWAY FROM KIDS, or they might be scarred for life. I admit I found myself seriously creeped out whilst reading this book alone late one night. But that's Darger! And you'll find just as many images of fanciful , wild, and utter beauty. His use of color is truly skillful, for someone so -- "unskilled." Unable to draw, he used a variety of creative techniques to achieve the results he wanted, such as collage, tracing, and color washes. The story of Darger is amazing, and this book gives him the detailed and in-depth treatment he deserves.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
The best book on Darger there is
By Michael Leddy
I just finished a first trek through this remarkable book. What especially strikes me is the way John MacGregor's writing captures the process of thinking through the enigma of Henry Darger's life and work. Reading the book is like watching a great detective at work--MacGregor writes not as though he's already come to conclusions but as though he's coming to them in the act of writing. And he manages to do so while organizing everything in a number of ways--around Darger's life history, his artistic and technical development, and the increasingly violence depcited in his work. Throughout the book MacGregor makes Henry Darger real--as a deeply damaged child and adult, as a tormented believer in God, as a person of enormous inner resources, and as a creative genius. His ways of accounting for Darger's peculiar obsessions (suffocstion, evisceration, male genitals on girls) are pwerfully persuasive, and draw upon considerable research into the circumstances of Darger's childhood and the nightmarish conditions at the "asylum" in Illinois where Darger spent much of his youuth.
I've read MacGregor's earlier book in French, Michael Bonesteel's book, and the American Folk Art Museum book, but this book taught me more about Darger than I could've imagined. If you're new to Darger, it's the book to begin with. If you're already familiar with Darger's work, this is the book you've been waiting for.
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