Near the end of In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, David Berglund describes a visit he paid to his 83-year-old neighbor Henry Darger at Saint Augustine’s Home for the Aged in the early 70s. Darger had been moved there from his little third-floor apartment in Lincoln Park, where he’d lived as a poor recluse for 41 years, working menial jobs and quietly finishing a 15,000-page epic novel and a long series of elaborate paintings to illustrate it. Berglund and Darger’s landlord, photographer and designer Nathan Lerner, had discovered the work as they cleaned out the old man’s apartment. When Berglund told Darger that he’d seen some of the artwork and thought it was beautiful, Darger was stunned. “It was like you sucker punch somebody, you hit ’em in the stomach and they gasp a bit,” says Berglund. “And he just looked up and he said, ‘Too late now.’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As with many outsider artists, the lack of information about Darger is part of his mystique, and Yu often seems more interested in perpetuating the mystery than in dispelling it: periodically she edits together voice-overs from witnesses saying they don’t know the answer to a question or giving contradictory responses, even down to the pronunciation of Darger’s name (which has a hard g).
Despite the mountain of writing Darger left behind—including a second novel that’s 8,500 pages long and a 5,084-word memoir mostly devoted to a firsthand account of a tornado—the facts of his life are sparse. When he was three his mother died giving birth to his sister, who was put up for adoption, and eventually his crippled father sent him to a Catholic home for boys. By his account Darger witnessed Dickensian cruelties at the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, as a teenager. After his father died in 1907 he escaped from the facility and returned to Chicago, working at various Catholic institutions until his retirement. The church provided most of the structure in his lonely life, and he was a devoted servant, attending mass several times a day.
A more demanding but ultimately more rewarding portrait of an artist outside the mainstream is Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1974), a Norwegian TV movie nearly three hours long that screens all week at the Gene Siskel Film Center in a restored print. Like Darger, Munch (1863-1944) lost his mother at a very young age and grew up in fervently Christian surroundings that complicated his sexuality. He, however, had two things Darger didn’t—money and society—and while his eerie domestic studies may have scandalized the bourgeoisie of his native Christiania (now Oslo), he exhibited his work throughout Europe in the late 19th century and enjoyed critical recognition in Germany, where paintings like The Scream influenced the expressionist movement.
Directed and written by Jessica Yu
Edvard Munch ★★★★ (Masterpiece)
Directed and written by Peter Watkins
With Geir Westby and Kare Stormark
