Although it is my pleasure to cover contemporary art by living artists in this column, I hope readers will give me leave to discuss a dead one this week, because the Henry Darger exhibition at the Watari-Um Museum of Art is just too fantastic an event to ignore.
Darger was born in 1892 and spent most of his youth in a Chicago orphanage. Records indicate that the staff there considered the young Darger to be mentally ill. At the age of 17, an unhappy Darger fled the orphanage. He found work as a janitor in a local hospital, rented a small apartment on the city's north side, and lived what for all appearances was a normal, albeit reclusive, life. He got old, then sick, and died in 1973 at the age of 80.
While cleaning out the apartment, Darger's landlord, a photographer named Nathan Lerner, discovered in his ex-tenant's room the towering mass of an illustrated manuscript 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." At 23,000 single-spaced typewritten pages, Darger's "The Realms," as it is generally known, is undoubtedly the longest story ever written by a single human being.