The epic vision of outsider artist Henry Darger is captured for the first time in this comprehensive survey of his art and writings. A janitor by day, he spent his nights creating a vast, imaginative world describing a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. 125 color illustrations.

An authoritative, balanced, and insightful look at American master Henry Darger (1892-1972). Presents his art and an exploration of his complex role in the art of our time.

Moon turns his attention to the artist Henry Darger, an eccentric and self-taught artist whose work was only discovered after his death. Since then the work has become famous, but Darger himself has generally been seen as a withdrawn outsider artist whose work may have been the result of mental illness. Moon provides a contrasting view of a creative and gifted artist very responsive to the world around him.

"Henry Darger was utterly unknown during his lifetime, keeping a quiet, secluded existence as a janitor on Chicago's North Side. When he died his landlord discovered a treasure trove of more than three hundred canvases and more than 30,000 manuscript pages depicting a rich, shocking fantasy world-many showing hermaphroditic children being eviscerated, crucified and strangled. While some art historians tend to dismiss Darger as an unhinged psychopath, in Henry Darger, Throw-Away Boy, Jim Elledge cuts through the cloud of controversy and rediscovers Darger as a damaged, fearful, gay man, raised in a world unaware of the consequences of child abuse or gay shame. This thoughtful, sympathetic biography tells the true story of a tragically misunderstood artist. Drawn from fascinating histories of the vice-ridden districts of 1900s Chicago, tens of thousands of pages of primary source material, and Elledge's own work in queer history, the book also features a full-color reproduction of a never-before-seen canvas from a private gallery in New York, as well as a previously undiscovered photograph of Darger with his life-partner Whillie. Engaging and arresting, Henry Darger, Throw-Away Boy brings alive a complex, brave, and compelling man whose outsider art is both challenging and a triumph over trauma"--

Henry Darger, who died in 1973, was a secretive Chicago janitor who has since been recognised as one of the supreme self-taught artists of the 20th century. This volume catalogues the American Folk Art Museum's recent acquisition of 37 Darger paintings.

The fifteen works by Darger, property of the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, are being exhibited for the first time in their totality at the Galleria Gottardo. In addition to the author's essays, the book also contains a selection of texts in Darger's original language. All of the works in the collection have been reproduced in large format, along with detail photographs, original drawings and pictures of the artist, and of the room exactly as it was found at the time of his death.

This book is the first to examine Henry Darger’s conceptual and visual representation of “girls” and girlhood. Specifically, Leisa Rundquist charts the artist’s use of little girl imagery—his direct appropriations from mainstream sources as well as girls modified to meet his needs—in contexts that many scholars have read as puerile and psychologically disturbed. Consequently, this inquiry qualifies the intersexed aspects of Darger’s protagonists as well as addresses their inherent cute and little associations that signal multivocal meanings often in conflict with each other. Rundquist engages Darger’s art through thematic analyses of the artist’s writings, mature works, collages, and ephemeral materials. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art and gender studies, sociology, and contemporary art.