Henry Darger

Henry Darger’s reputation as an outsider artist – and the questions of morality lingering around his dark paintings – has inspired recent exhibitions, books, plays and a documentary. Julie Chevalier’s poetic biography Darger: his girls (subtitled a sequence of poems about the life of Henry Darger 1892 – 1973) has come at peak-Darger fever. Chevalier includes an introduction, familiarising us with the debate about what kind of man Henry Darger really was: child murderer, or misunderstood loner? The latter explanation is explored throughout this work.