A LIFE OF BIZARRE OBSESSION

By ROBERT HUGHES

For a few years now, "outsider art"--meaning the work of amateur artists with no access to the art world as a system--has been a rising vogue in America. Each winter a whole fair is dedicated to it in New York City, and there isn't a scribbling schizophrenic, crotcheting aunt or suburban obsessive constructing replicas of the Eiffel Tower from wooden toothpicks in his New Jersey basement who can be deemed altogether immune to discovery by dealers. There's no mystery about why this should be so, since a) the art market has run out of new "movements," while b) there has been a slight backlash against the star system of the art world and the excesses of its market, causing a new ripple of pseudo-penitential interest in the anonymous, the amateurish, the "naive" or "incorrupt" artist. Having run out of external primitives, America must find internal ones, and there are plenty to go around.

One of them--now become one of the stars of an anti-star system--lived and died in Chicago. Reclusive, poor and harmlessly mad, Henry Darger (1892-1973) was one of the legion of those who fall through the cracks in American life, never to emerge again. Brought up from age eight in the miseries of Catholic boys' homes (and later in an asylum for feebleminded children, from which he managed to escape at 16), he supported himself for decades doing menial work in several Catholic hospitals. Intensely, not to say neurotically, pious, he went to Mass as often as five times a day. For the last 40 years of his life he dwelled in a small rented room on Chicago's North Side, from which he would timorously sally forth to collect street trash. After his pauper's death, hundreds of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles and nearly a thousand balls of string were found in his room. He had no friends and talked to himself incessantly in various voices. He did, however, have a secret life of disconcerting size and visionary intensity. Its traces were found after his death by his landlord, a photographer named Nathan Lerner, who preserved them. Some of them--63 watercolors--are on view through April 27 in a show curated by Stephen Prokopoff at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan.

The work of Darger's life was a saga titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. He wrote it in longhand, and then typed it out; the typescript ran to more than 15,000 pages. It is a seemingly endless, repetitious and obsessively detailed narrative of child martyrdom, massacre and Edenic innocence set on an imaginary planet largely populated by moppets of six to 10.

One of its nations, Glandelinia, is villainously cruel and built on child slavery. The good country of Abbiennia, on the other hand, is pious, Catholic and freedom loving, and it goes to war against the Glandelinians to liberate the tots. In its struggles it is led by seven little princesses called the Vivian sisters (shades of Enid Blyton and Ethel M. Dell!). They are aided by benign dragonlike beasts called Blengins. Virtue triumphs in the end--over whole landscapes of child corpses. Since Darger probably began writing the work between 1910 and 1912, it's likely that his unreadable Iliad of two nations contending over slavery was a delayed response to the great trauma affecting his father's generation, the American Civil War.

He illustrated it--copiously. All of Darger's paintings served this obsessive narrative, beginning with small portraits of imaginary generals and developing into 12-ft.-long scrolls, done in watercolor and collage on joined sheets of paper. Darger had no formal training, and as far as is known he never visited a museum, although there are faint signs that he might have seen reproductions of Gauguin. He made it all up as he went along, according to the dictates of his compulsion. Since he couldn't draw the human body, he traced his muffin heroines and victims from children's books, comic strips and advertisements. He would then give the naked ones tiny penises and sometimes, even more puzzling, horns.

Bizarre obsessions don't make interesting art in themselves, but Darger had genuine talent beyond them, particularly in his power of formal arrangement and his sense of color. At their best, his friezes of androgynous Shirley Temploids hold the long scroll format beautifully, with a fine sense of interval and grouping. With the big, delicate flowers and butterflies alternating with weird, cavernous landscapes, searchlight rays and puffs of rifle smoke, they are like a skewed version of Kate Greenaway's Victorian illustrations. The pale, blooming color is rarely less than inventive, and it can break out into a startling decorative richness--as in Two Spangled Blengins, showing a pair of dragons with striped and polka-dotted wings hovering protectively around a cutout of a little girl.

It would be easy in these prurient days to think of Darger merely as a compulsive old pervert--a sort of Poussin of pedophilia. (One art-historian-cum-psychiatrist opined in the New York Times that "psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer," a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about his character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly; much the same--and on the same evidence--could be said about the authors of the Old Testament.)

It makes more sense to relate his work, in all its extreme, inward-directed fantasies of evil and innocence, to Darger's main lifeline, the Catholic faith. Catholic iconography, as anyone knows who is even briefly exposed to it (and Darger was marinated in its kitsch forms for 70 years), is suffused with Massacres of the Innocents, scenes of the roasting, flaying and disemboweling of idealized martyrs, sinners in hellfire and visions of a countervailing Paradise. Rummaging back through his fantasies for redemption of his own wretchedly maimed childhood, Darger was able to bind up his wounds with his religious fixations. This, in the end, is what gave his art a power that did not exist in his life.