Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum - Hardcover

Brooke Davis Anderson; Michel Thevoz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810913984 ISBN 13: 9780810913981

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2001

Synopsis

Presents a catalog of the works of Henry Darger found at the American Folk Art Museum.

About this title

Review

Sweetly colored, pleasingly composed, and delicately rendered, Henry Darger's scroll-like paintings of armies of transsexual children have had a cult status since they were first shown in 1997 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The museum's paintings are part of a vast series illustrating the artist's 15,000-page story about the rescue of naked abducted children by seven little girls. Darger, a reclusive janitor and self-taught artist with ambivalent feelings about religion, spent his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, and in the years before his death in 1973 attended Mass several times daily. The real virtues of this slender book are the 114 full-color illustrations of the paintings, which range from fanciful nature scenes to gruesome battle images. The chief essay, by Michel Thévoz, is a pretentious effort that treats Darger's startling and wholly original pastiche of images drawn from magazines and coloring books at a fastidious arm's length. --Cathy Curtis

From the Publisher

Exhibition Schedule: American Folk Art Museum, New York: Dec. 2001-Apr. 2002

Edition details

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0810913984
• ISBN 13: 9780810913981
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128