Product Description
Published in 2008, this is the second edition of the 9 x 13 inch catalogue published on the occasion of solo exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris, 2006. Text both in English and French. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Sweetly colored, pleasingly composed, and delicately rendered, Henry Darger's scroll-like paintings of armies of transsexual children have had a cult status since they were first shown in 1997 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The museum's paintings are part of a vast series illustrating the artist's 15,000-page story about the rescue of naked abducted children by seven little girls. Darger, a reclusive janitor and self-taught artist with ambivalent feelings about religion, spent his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, and in the years before his death in 1973 attended Mass several times daily. The real virtues of this slender book are the 114 full-color illustrations of the paintings, which range from fanciful nature scenes to gruesome battle images. The chief essay, by Michel Thévoz, is a pretentious effort that treats Darger's startling and wholly original pastiche of images drawn from magazines and coloring books at a fastidious arm's length. --Cathy Curtis Book Description
When Henry Darger died in 1973 at the age of 81, he left behind an astonishing cache of art, shocking in both its content and its sheer size. The trove included massive, multi-volume illustrated manuscripts, double-sided nine-foot-long watercolor murals, photo-enlarged tracings, and hundreds of sketches. Depicting a turbulent world, these works are the product of the fertile yet tormented imagination of a secretive Chicago janitor who has since been recognized as one of the supreme self-taught artists of the 20th century.

Cataloguing in full color the American Folk Art Museum's recent acquisition of 37 paintings, among other Darger works, this informative yet affordable volume offers a general introduction to a controversial self-taught artist. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Q: madness or genius? A: madness
there is no question, henry darger is not a genius. the fascinating visual effect of his pictures is not contrived, it is the real result of an extremely neurotic man. but that's what makes these pictures so hard to forget.

to put them in context, almost all of the known works of henry darger are a part of the same epic narrative project. the drawings are accompanied by a 5,000 page plus text, telling the story of the vivian girls.

darger was not very good at drawing figures, so he traced photos and cartoons he clipped from magazines and newspapers. supposedly he once lost the newspaper photo of a kidnapped girl that he had been using for one of the main characters, and this forced him to write into the story a search for her. he was so frustrated by this loss that he cursed god and exhibited some sort of religious tantrum.

it is very interesting to look at his pictures and speculate on how each one came to be. i saw one in a museum, which had four cowboys on horses, positioned in a diamond formation, each lasoing a little girl. the space created is distorted like an optical illusion, with spots collapsing and overlapping in ways that do not make sense, so that you can see one object appears in front of another in one spot but behind it in another.

these pictures might give you nightmares or cause seizures.

Darger: madman or genius
I must admit that before i picked up this volume, i wasnt certain of the answer to the aforementioned question. I knew about him, had read bits and pieces about him, but did not know the full scope of his talent.

This book allows the reader to see not just his art, but to catch a glimpse of the sheer magnitude of his madness/genius. The art work is brilliantly reproduced (seeing his stack of journals made the book worthwhile for me).

If you are at all interested in seeing the work and a glimpse of the life of one of the outsider art masters, i suggest that you pick up this book at once.

3rd Favorite Darger Book
For sheer size and volume, Henry Darger in the Realms of the Unreal is the best bet. An exhaustive essay into Darger's background and psychology and numerous reproductions, some not in any of the other darger books, all in color. The one drawback of the book is that because it is so big (500+ pages), it doesn't hold together well at the binding and pages start to become loose. But this is an essential Darger book to have.

The other essential Darger book is Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. The essay portion wasn't as interesting to me as the Unreality of Being book, but this has just as many reproductions and maybe more. Also the book is a more manageable size, the reproductions seem a little better, and it's a great single volume.

The book from the American Folk Art Museum is much smaller than the other 2 in number of pages, the reproductions seem smaller, and there's even less text than the other two books. However, it is the least expensive by a significant amount making it the "bargain" Darger book. For that reason, it would be a good buy for a casual Darger fan. But if you already have the first two books, this one is too repetitive. If you are a big Darger fan, you should try and make the visit to see the exhibition at the Folk Art Museum in New York. Being able to see them in person is a great experience. The size, colors, texture are almost too much to take in, so many details....they are amazing to look at. ... Read more

Amazon.com
The voluminous works of Henry Darger were discovered after his death in 1973 by his landlord in a crowded and almost derelict apartment on Chicago's Northside. Among the piles of newspapers, magazines, and hundreds of balls of twine were scrapbooks made from telephone books and an entire lifetime of creative work. Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings is an amazing window into the extraordinary world of this outsider artist.

In order to escape his unhappy childhood in a mental institution and his reclusive adult life, Darger created his own salvation in the form of an intricate fantasy world of drawings and stories revolving around a set of little girl heroines, with vivid watercolors and collages of children engaged in battles against their enemies. The images are violent and strange, yet they achieve a fragile beauty. His work has taken a long time to gain attention in part due to his disturbing "obsession with little girls ... as hermaphrodites with small penises--and worse, a significant number of works that graphically depicted the strangulation, evisceration, and wholesale slaughter of children." Beyond the graphic nature of the artwork is a story that intertwines religion, superstition, loneliness, and bravery. This remarkable book offers the chance to take a journey through the life, mind, and creative process of a true artist, and it includes entries from his personal diaries and chapters from his fictional saga, "In the Realms of the Unreal." --J.P. Cohen Book Description

Customer Reviews (5)

Realms of the Unreal.
This isn't concerning the book but I thought I would inform everyone that there is a film on Henry Darger that will be at the Sundance Film Fest (Park City, Utah) The title of the documentary is called "Henry Darger: Realms of the Unreal."It looks to be a great film. The filmakers have also animated parts of his paintings.Hopefully the film will make to near your home in the future. I just picked up my tickets so if you can I would recommend it. Good Luck.

unexpected, inexplicable, and simply unreal...
Henry Darger (1892-1973) spent most of his life working as a dishwasher, janitor, and bandage roller at a hospital in Chicago.Darger's mother died in childbirth with his sister when Darger was 3 years old, and his father died when Darger was 15.The family was economically destitute, and the young Darger ended up in boys homes, orphanages, and such unsavory institutions as the "Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children" in Lincoln, Illinois.Darger lived most of his adult life in the same apartment, and when he died in 1973 his landlord found a number of homemade books containing three large manuscripts written and illustrated by Darger, each more than 5000 pages long.

The most important manuscript is the first, a 14 volume work titled "The Realms of the Unreal, or the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion," which Darger spent two decades writing and illustrating.This epic is the chronicled history of a 4-year war on an imaginary world.On this world, children have been enslaved and a war breaks out to free them.Spearheading the rebellion are the seven Vivian sisters, little girl heroes--figures which seem to have been based, at least partly, on Joan of Arc.Among the story's other main influences are Frank L. Baum's Oz books, the works of Charles Dickens, and the history of the American Civil War.

Darger's artwork is both imaginatively vivid and disturbing.Most of the art involves little girls as the heroes and the victims, with men and supernatural creatures called "the Blegiglomenean Serpents" (or, "the Blengins") as their oppressors.The little girls are often depicted in idyllic portraits; however, they are also often shown being strangled or killed in battle.Also, they are often nude, and sometimes portrayed as hermaphrodites with male genitals.Much of Darger's work is composed of individual figures traced from magazines or comics.Artistically, Darger is compared with figures as diverse as Blake and Andy Warhol.

Visionary brilliance
Henry Darger, the janitor who spent a lifetime writing and illustrating a loving paedophile epic of staggering proportions never seen until his death, has not yet found his time but it will come.His frenzied Blake-like illustrations have had some exposure in museums which feature outsider and folk art (like the recent exhibit at P.S.1 in NYC) but this collection of his work exhibits a glimpse of the novel they were designed to support.With no training his obsessive masterpiece includes prose, poetry, songs and maps.Infectious in a raw undeniable way it is a spelendid, brilliant, disturbing and awesome.

very nice
I've waited for a collection of Darger's work ever since I first saw a handful of originals on exhibit at the County Museum. This volume has a lot (over 100?) of high quality color reproductions of the Vivian Girls leading the sometimes bloody, cosmic child slavery rebellion against the invading Glandelinians, along with source material, and some interesting shots of Darger's studio/apartment.

There are also some pretty interesting writing excerpts from Darger's mammoth source material, REALMS OF THE UNREAL (which dwarfs the notebook writing of David Fincher's antagonists in SEVEN and FIGHT CLUB). It's pretty genuine, and the editors contend to've kept the editing to a crucial minimum.

Tim Burton, et al., can claim to be as weird or on the fringe as much as they want, but they don't hold a candle to someone with a real chemical imbalance.

It's pricey, but well worth it if you're a collector of this sort of stuff. Now, if only someone would make a comparable collection for Adolfo Wolfi...

A necessity for understanding Henry
There have been several things written about Henry Darger and his art but this book is the definitive work.If you want to understand Henry Darger and get a full appreciation of his genius,, read this book and enjoy the beautiful illustrations. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Of art and other demons.
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.

The Creation of An Alternate World
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.

Joseoh C. Tedeschi
For anyone looking to enter the unreal realms of Henry Darger, his writings and his artwork, MacGregor's book is essential. He has both exhaustively researched and reconstructed Darger's life as an isolated, perhaps mentally disturbed individual working as a dishwasher and janitor in Chicago and delved deeply into the often gruesome content of Darger's fantasy realm. The book itself is a wonder - it is like a great independent film, unflinching, provocative, well-constructed.

Henry Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal
As an art therapist, I read Dr.John M.MacGregor's book, 'Henry
Darger,In the Realms of the Unreal'and marvelled at the potency of art as a therapeutic agent.

Henry Darger initiated his own therapy.He painted a torrent of images representing his rage.Without his art and his writing, I wonder who would have been the target of this volcanic fury.

John MacGregor's book is a must for all art therapy faculties and departments.

Beth Robinson

Darger: Brilliant, scary enigma
Darger's voluminous work, of which the drawings are only the tip of the iceberg, are inaccessable, literally, except for fragments published in a previous collection.Even if the full opus was available it would still be a alien monument due to it's sheer size, attracting only the peculiarly curious and those who have aquired the taste for Darger's vision.This said, MacGregor's work is a valuable description by a voyager to a dark continent who is capable of expressing the awe, fear and wonder that he experienced when immersed in this strange land.The book is lush, in design and writing, and each chapter tackles a different aspect of the Darger mystery.I imagine attempting to read all of Darger would cause the odd combination of shock and boredom that de Sade's work elicits, trangressive scenes compulsively written ad nausiam.MacGregor distills the major themes of Henry's work, avoids the mind-numbing repetition, yet preserves the vertigo of scale that Darger achieved, intentionally or otherwise.An odd masterpeice written about an even odder masterpeice. ... Read more

Book Description
Henry Darger spent his life working as a janitor in Catholic hospitals, living alone in a rented room on Chicago's north side, attending Mass up to five times a day, and writing a picaresque tale in 15 massive volumes, composed of 145 handwritten pages and 5,084 single-spaced typed pages, and titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. To accompany this enormous literary production, Darger also created several hundred large-scale illustrations--pencil on paper drawings painted over with watercolor and occasional additions of collage--that relate the story: On an unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon, the good Christian nation of Anniennia wars with the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. The heroines are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses, who, after many battles, fires, tempests, and lurid torture, succeed in forcing the Glandelinians to give up their barbarous ways. The Disasters of War offers an affordable introduction to Darger's astonishing outsider oeuvre. It explains the technique, diligence, and creativity of the works, illustrates details, and features a conversation between the Darger estate holder and the Kunstwerke's curator. A selection of 12 previously unpublished excerpts from The Realms of the Unreal and from Darger's diary explore the artist's favorite topics: thunderstorms and atrocities. With a biography and exhibition history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Janitor or Genius
This is my favorite book about outsider artist Henry Darger. Check out the amazing film by Mark Salzman's wife. The bio, Man in the Polka Dotted Dress is not coming out cuz the guy who sells Darger for thousands bills is dirty. No oneis finding Darger's long lost sister. Chill out, you are still rich cuz of another man's genius. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by The Register Guard on March 27, 2005. The length of the article is 981 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A spin into the odd world of Henry Darger.(Entertainment)(Seattle dance troupe brings its view of one man's art to the stage)
Publication: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) (Newspaper)
Date: March 27, 2005
Publisher: The Register Guard
Page: L5

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, published by Parachute Contemporary Art on October 1, 1997. The length of the article is 1060 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Henry Darger (exhibition).
Author: Christine Martin
Publication: Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 1997
Publisher: Parachute Contemporary Art
Issue: 88Page: 69

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
9 x 13 inch catalogue published on the occasion of solo exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris, 2006. Text both in English and French. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Henry Darger
I bought this for my daughter for Christmas.. she LOVED it. It was a bit expensive, but well worth it.It was paperback.. would have liked hard cover, but that wasn't available. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Etc. Montreal, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2006. The length of the article is 2198 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Le mannequin et la poupee, une icone explosive?(Paris)
Author: Ludovic Fouquet
Publication: Etc. Montreal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Issue: 76Page: 61(6)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (6)

3.75 stars : I, too, find him prepossessing
Predictable surprises -- and a few unpredictable ones -- inhabit this volume, a single long poem loosely based on the illustrations of Henry Darger. There are chuckleworthy phrases that rattle about the brain with a happy insouciance for several days after one has read the thing. "The oxymoron gets his rocks off" and "pink shrouds fell on the pansy jamboree."And we like going for the ride, even if we get a little dizzy and a little seasick. The "androgynous truths" bubble perkily to the surface, in a verbal universe where what matters matters as much as what doesn't matter.We know a few of the magician's tricks, but there are always a few swerves and slides which we can't anticipate. The honey drips from a blighted bough -- or is it a bright and sprightly bough? -- and the housepets lap the gruel in their gaily-coloured bowls, and the narrator stands back and lets it all happen.As with anything by Ashbery, there are unwholesome things and things from which the reader runs away, but we marvel at the ingenuity nonetheless.

Ashbery and Naive Literature
I picked this up on impulse. I'm interested in the work of Henry J. Darger. But I was not taken by this book at all. Ashbery flows a lot of beautiful verbiage together. But it's incomprehensible at a first readingand I'm not going to spend more time trying to root anything out of it. Itseems like a lot of surrealist automatic writing. There were occasionalimages that would surface in an appealing way like, "count the dogs asfurniture as otherwise there will be no chairs," but few of the imagesrecurred enough to give any sense of narrative or unifying theme. I betDarger's naive literature is a lot more fascinating than this.

Pastoral, apocalyptic fin-de-siecle masterpiece
I, too, have always admired but never been bowled over by John Ashberry's work. With this work I am convinced he is our greatest American poet.Since I am familiar with Henry Darger's pictures and style, Ashberry'simagery seems natural even as it is surreal.The two share an aesthetic ofusing common cultural artifacts and twisting them so that even thoughyou're staring right at them, you no longer recognize what you're seeing.It is a dream language, and Ashberry has never been so adept at navigatingthat territory. The poetry, like Darger's paintings, mix the pastoral andthe apocalyptic, the innocent and the decadent with such unsettlingvirtuostic ease that you're not sure which is which. If I had to pick apoetry to compare it to, I might pick Blake--both for the lyric sweetnessand hinted threats of "Innocence and Experience," and thecultural commentary/prophecy of his later, longer work. If, like me, yourexperience with Ashberry's work has left you shrugging, this os the placeto start. I don't read much poetry anymore--this will reaffirm your faithin it.

Most great
Words very good, yes. Ashbery writes best good book. Yes, buy it, good, yes.

Good beach reading!
This is the very favorite book that I read.It has an author by John Ashbery.It is real poetry.I wanted to read it 2x before I read it.It is good for the beach reading (date: June 18).Please bring a dictionaryto look up the different words.Who are the girls (names)?I took thisbook to everywhere I was going one day and finished that book in 3 daysafter going 19 places.Please read this enjoyable imagination. ... Read more