Although he traced and painted and wrote in obscurity until the day he died, Henry Darger is, today, probably the best-known outsider artist in the world. In the past decade or so, the confines of his one-room Chicago apartment have ceded to the spacious galleries of museums and art fairs, and Henry Darger — a man who kept mostly to himself, not quite reclusive but not incredibly social either — has become the poster child of outsider art.
But what happens when someone becomes famous, especially posthumously, is you (or I) sometimes forget that there is or was a person behind that fame — a real person, a human being, who lived a life and created the art that people now refer to, both succinctly and dismissively, as “those paintings of the little girls with the penises.” It’s good to remember and revisit that human being once in a while.
