The strange tale of Henry Darger, who made art his salvation

In 1973, when a Chicago landlord began emptying the junk-packed apartment of a tenant who had died without a will or heirs, he was shocked to discover the reclusive man's secret.

Stored among the stacks of old newspapers, magazines and wall-to-wall debris in the small apartment was the obsessive lifework of the former janitor who'd been holed up there for decades. The room held little usable furniture, just a single chair and a large battered table. But it was piled with diaries, manuscripts, stacks of drawings, an eight-volume autobiography, an oddly emotional weather journal and the most astonishing thing — a 15,000-page epic in words and pictures 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."

The tenant's name was Henry Darger, and the strange story of his life and the disturbing nature of his sometimes lilting, yet often violent and emotionally wrenching picture stories have been haunting audiences — and inspiring other artists — ever since. He created a fantastical world of enslaved and tortured children held captive by evil adults. The heroic Vivian Girls strive to save the children in a prolonged war against their tormentors.

Perhaps the girls were Darger's emotional surrogates, taking revenge against his childhood suffering, for he often depicted their naked prepubescent bodies with little penises. Some conjecture that the reclusive artist never learned the anatomical difference between boys and girls. You can draw your own conclusions at the fascinating exhibition "Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum," which opened Saturday at the Frye Art Museum. No doubt it will attract crowds of the curious and the faithful.

Darger (1892-1973) is an artist whose life and art aren't easily separated. He acted out his emotional traumas through his obsessive creations. His mother died in childbirth when Henry was 3. The troubled boy developed a dislike of younger children, slashing a little girl with a knife and throwing ashes in another's eyes. At 8, he was sent to a Catholic boys' home, where he had few friends and a reputation for swinging from rage to extreme remorse.

As an adolescent, he was moved to an "Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children," which had a horrible reputation for abuse, according to an essay by Michael Bonesteel in the book "Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings." One child there died of burns when left in a hot bath; another tried to castrate himself — and died — because he thought his epilepsy was caused by "inappropriate sexual urges." After a few years at the asylum, Darger got the news that his father had died, and he sank into despair. Eventually he ran away, back to Chicago, and got a job as janitor. Then began his long struggle to process his pain by pasting it into an imaginary world — art as self-preservation.

As an artist, Henry Darger is the great equalizer. Nobody can claim to be an expert on interpreting his work. He made his pictures with no formal training and took the secrets of his imagery with him when he died. "I find all the explanations really inadequate," said Frye curator Robin Held. "I like the idea the girls have penises because they are little empowered princesses, but that's really not convincing, either."

The characters in Darger's repertoire are usually traced from other pictures and sometimes photographed so that they could be flipped, altered, enlarged or reduced to fit the composition he envisioned. His elaborate larger paintings unfurl in scrolls of pieced-together paper, with images of battles and storms and angelic girl warriors drawn on both sides. The exhibition lays out Darger's working methods, providing cases of source material — the magazines, newspapers, comics, children's books and cartoons that he copied from to create his characters.

Horrible things happen to the children in Darger's imaginary world: They are chained, beaten, strangled, cut open. Adults enslave the little ones, and the Vivian Girls strike back to save them. Parents should use discretion about bringing young children.

Also on display is a bafflingly perfect bound typescript from "The Story of the Vivian Girls." To achieve such error-free copy for thousands of pages, Darger must have slowly and methodically punched out the words on his typewriter, one letter at a time, year after year after year.

Darger developed certain technical skills in copying and manipulating found images. He was creative with materials, using transparent waxed paper and all kinds of discarded paper to trace and draw on. He achieved beautiful color with limited means. He devised opulent, sophisticated compositions and mysterious narratives. By necessity, because his drawing skills were limited, Darger used repetition of forms, but he was able to create compelling effects. In the painting captioned "At Julio Callio via Norma They are captured by the Glandelinians," he has created something reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian frieze, with the line of figures torso forward, legs and face angled to the side, each caught in a different motion. Had he ever seen a reproduction of Egyptian art? Who knows.

What really matters is that Darger created his art out of pain and persistence. He did it because he had to. It was all he had.

His writing and his drawings were the tender secret of an uncomforted and uncompanioned man who fled into the unreal. His lonely adult life was a scar formed over wounds too deep to heal.

Few have suffered the same degree of loss or trauma that he did. But most of us know enough to experience a gut-level understanding of his compulsive imaginary world.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com