Gay men, especially artistic ones, like to fancy themselves as outsiders. But the real social pariahs — the unhospitalized schizophrenics, death-row inmates and self-taught visionaries that are featured in a new gallery show of Outsider Art in London — make most of us look as routine as mailmen.

At the center of the current Whitechapel Gallery show is little-girl artist Henry Darger, whose work you see here.

A janitor who attended Catholic Mass three times a day but otherwise had no human contact, Darger lived in a one-room apartment in Chicago. After he died, in 1973, his landlords discovered that for decades he’d been illustrating a fantastical epic about a war between a group of little girls (the Vivian Girls) and a fascist dictatorship (the Glandelinians). The manuscript was over 15,000 pages, some of it drawn on butcher’s wrapping paper.

Titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, the pen and ink watercolors relate the adventures of seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbiennia, who wage a daring rebellion against a regime of child slavery imposed by the Glandelinians. The latter, all grown men, resemble Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War.

The Vivians are joined by an army of little girls, who are often slain in battle, or expire after vicious torture by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology includes a species of girls with butterfly wings and curved ram’s horns, a treacherous race that are usually (though not always) benevolent toward the Vivians.

As is typical of Outsider art, Darger was absolutely self-taught and had almost no knowledge of technique. He was raised in an asylum for the feeble minded but only because he was an orphan with behavior problems — as one doctor put it, “Little Henry’s heart is not in the right place.” Actually, he was considered unusually bright, if strange, and, as a boy, showed a passion for Civil War history.

His little girls, who sometimes appear fully naked on the field of battle, were traced out of coloring books, often in repeating patterns. A peculiar feature of these drawings, beside the atmosphere of peril, lynchings and firing-squad executions that befall the army of Vivians, is that some of them have penises.

This, Darger scholars suggest, may be a measure of how profound the janitor’s isolation was: It is believe he was ignorant of female anatomy, even of its most basic defining feature.

Most peculiar of all, the epic was started when Darger lost a newspaper clipping of a little girl who had been strangled. It is conjectured by one of his biographers that Darger may have strangled her himself.

It was only when he was too crippled to continue that Darger brought his little-girl saga to a close, with two alternate endings: in one, the Vivians and Christianity triumph, in the other, the godless Glandelinians reign. At present, Henry Darger is the most famous of the Outsider artists. His work fetches $50,000 per watercolor and three ballets have been made from his “In the Realms of the Unreal.”

Why has such sociopathic art caught the imagination of not only the art world, but the wider public? This is the question contemplated — with a refreshingly unsentimental eye — by Philip Hensher whose review of the Whitechapel show in the Guardian focuses primarily on Darger:

The fascination of Outsider art is brilliantly explored by an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, “Inner Worlds Outside.” It sets the work of self-taught obsessives — sometimes, people with mental illness — next to the work of classic artists who had an interest in their bizarre work.

That’s always been the rationale for taking it seriously. In previous generations, western artists discovered African tribal art, children’s art, graffiti — things outside the accepted canon — and learned from those simplicities. Subsequently, artists such as Klee and Dubuffet imitated the outsiders, and their art was rejuvenated.

The point where this argument falls down is that the Outsider art on display at the Whitechapel looks a thousand times more fascinating than its professional imitators … I found myself hastening past great Dubuffets, and lingering in front of vast ugly works produced by people who, to be honest, didn’t know how to draw…

Suspicious of anyone claiming to have talent or skill, … we like our cultural heroes to be people who in general can’t do anything — what Ferdinand Mount has called the Five-Minute Playmates of Big Brother — or people who earn a living by the mere chance of their being, such as models. The culture prefers the celebrity with no ability, not much caring whether a singer can sing or not…

No wonder Outsider art wields such a fascination. Anyone, it is suggested, could do something like this, and it’s striking that in many of [the artist's] stories, the source of their inspiration is presented as something over which they had no control. If the spirits visited Madge Gill [another artist in the exhibition, who goes into trances and paints yards and yards of patterns], they could visit anyone. It reduces artistic creation to the level of winning the lottery.

I admit to being gripped by Outsider art, and I think the cult of it comes from something very admirable. Art isn’t an exclusive club, after all; and there is something in the belief held by Joseph Beuys that the 20th century had probably had enough of authority figures…

But in 100 years’ time, I’m sure that our taste for all of this will seem absolutely extraordinary, like the 18th-century’s keenness on idiotic “panoramas”. There’s no doubt that Auden was right:… taste has taken some kind of wrong path.

Wrong path or not, the strange morality tale of the Vivian Girls continues to stop us in our tracks whenever we come across these always disturbing Henry Darger watercolors.

Henry Darger, in one of the handful of photos
ever taken of him.

To learn more about the artist, check out:

The PBS special In the Realms of the Unreal
A large collection of online Vivian Girls for auction
at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago