Darker Stars: The Roots of Steampunk Art

Henry Darger (1892-1973) Henry Darger was born in 1892 and lived in Chicago with his father“a tailor and a kind and easygoing man,” until 1900, when the elder Darger, crippled, had to be taken to live in a Catholic mission, at which time the young Henry Darger was placed in a boys’ home. He was institutionalized in 1905, shortly after his father passed away, but managed to escape in 1908. For the next 50 years, Darger managed to support himself with menial jobs in Catholic hospitals. Later in life he barely got by on Social Security checks. He attended Mass frequently, dressed humbly, and generally lived a very reclusive life. It wasn’t until after his death that his landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner, discovered Darger’s creative life’s work hidden amongst the hoarded debris in his rented room.

Darger created nearly 300 watercolor and collage paintings, bound into three volumes, to illustrate his masterpiece, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, a tale about a world torn apart by war. He began to work on In the Realms of the Unreal (as it is commonly called) when he was about 19 years old, and when it was completed, after decades of work, the typewritten manuscript was 15,145 pages long and comprised 13 volumes. The heroes in this tale are always the children, the villains typically adults. This story of war and peace, of good versus evil, loosely parallels many of the events of the American Civil War. The fantastic watercolors accompanying the narrative and measure up to 12 feet in width, are among the works by Darger that are most celebrated today.