It is an unfortunate thing that many artists don’t become well-known until either very late in their careers or until they die. To be able to support ones self and family off the arts would be a wonderful thing would it not? Or maybe it too would become a boring monotonous job with no end in sight. Maybe one day I will know that answer.

For now however I am left to view this through the stories of others. There are many artists today that have become wealthy off their works, but there are also those who have not. This is a story of the latter.

This story is about Henry Darger. You have probably never heard of him, but that is because until recently he was not dead. Henry Darger spent most of his teenage years at the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. When he grew up he found himself working an uneventful job for 54 years. I can hardly keep a job for 1 year without leaving for something more exciting, how one does it for 54 years is beyond my comprehension. Darger was said to attend Catholic Mass but for the most part he stayed in his home. Alone.

In 1973 a group of volunteers were cleaning out piles of clutter in the 81 year olds room, when they discovered some amazing things.

Three massive manuscripts, including a 10-volume work (At 15,145 pages, 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—or the Realms, for short—is the longest known work of fiction ever written), a large collection of watercolors and many collages he had created to illustrate his stories.

It has been 35 years since Darger died, and his works are now selling for up to $80,000 and being hung in galleries across the world. One place where you can see his works is at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, a Chicago gallery.

Most of the stories and illustrations involve young girls, some of them have male genitalia, and are set on other planets with weird monstors and soldiers. Some works show the girls being killed by the soldiers, but no where is there any sexual activity.

“Although Darger was intellectually gifted enough to skip two grades in elementary school, he was hard to control. At age 12 or 13, he was sent downstate to The Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in 1904. He escaped in 1909, took a train as far as Decatur and then walked 180 miles to Chicago. Except for brief military training in 1917, he never left the city again.His manuscripts and the largest body of his collages and watercolors are housed at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Another major collection is at the Musee de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.“

While it is a horrible thing for a person to be crazy, depressed and alone most of ones life, it does seem to be a good recipe for great artwork.

Sources: NYTimes MSNBC Village Voice