Henry Darger, the Vivian Girls and the Realm of the Unreal

Born in 1892, Henry Darger spent much of his life in quiet obscurity. After escaping from a psychiatric hospital as a teenager, Darger eked out a meager existence as a hospital janitor, living as a virtual recluse in a small apartment on Chicago’s North Side. It wasn’t until after his death in 1973 that evidence of his vivid inner life was revealed.

Entering his apartment, his landlords discovered numerous pieces of art – paintings and drawings utilizing cut-outs from magazines and newspapers, and several never-published books – most of which depicted scenes from a massive quasi-science fiction epic depicting the adventures of a group of sisters called the Vivian Girls and their battles against evil oppressors, all of which took place on an alternate Earth around which our own planet circled like a moon.

Darger’s epic work titled “In the Realms of the Unreal” depicted the children of this planet suffering unspeakably cruel punishment at the hands of their adult masters with the Vivian Girls fighting enemies both natural and supernatural in a struggle for freedom. People who saw the work were shocked by its explicit nature, both violent and naive. Darger sometimes depicted the girls in his drawings naked, yet with male genitalia, leading some to question whether this strange man even knew that the sexes were anatomically different. Others -more alarmingly – noticed his strange obsession with Elsie Paroubek, a little girl who was discovered strangled in 1911, and whose murderer was never identified? Could it have been Darger all the time? Paroubek turned up in Darger’s work with alarming regularity, and Darger himself kept a picture of the girl for years.

No one will ever know for sure if this quiet, strange man was a murderer, but his legacy as an artist continues to grow, with original work by Darger fetching very high prices at auction.