Henry’s room was on the third floor. It was filled with STUFF from floor to ceiling. There were stacks of newspapers, magazines, and empty bottles of Pepto Bismol. It appeared as though every single thing he had brought into the room in the forty years he had lived there had never left the room. There was hardly any space left to walk around.

Henry looked like a street person. He was very shy and never looked at you when you saw him on street and said “hello”…. Henry did look very dirty and uncared for not to mention the strange look in his eyes. He also always wore the same military overcoat which was greasy-looking and came down all the way to his ankles.

Whomever could have imagined that once he entered his room, this dirty, shuffling old man wrote and painted another world into being? …. None of us could make heads or tails of all this JUNK and the great mystery that we uncovered from Henry’s room.

Kiyoko Larner (landlord)

These photos show the apartment where the elderly outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973) spent the last forty years of his life, almost until he died on 13 April 1973, a third-floor backroom of a townhouse on Webster Avenue in Chicago.

He received no callers while still alive, other than occasional visits from the pastor of the local church or the landlord’s wife entering to change a light bulb. When he passed away without any relations and the landlord Nathan Lerner began to clean up the place, he made an astounding discovery: a novel of fifteen volumes entitled In the Realms of Unreal complete with several hundred pages of illustrations.

While most landlords might have disposed of it as so much rubbish, Lerner was himself an artist and able to appreciate its value as a work of rare creative value, and he promptly stopped cleaning the apartment. He kept most of Darger’s books and pictures for twenty-seven years until the room was cleared on 13 April 2000.

Darger himself has come to be recognized by the art world, and re-evaluated as “one of America’s most important artists of the twentieth century.” As of last year, 2006, a masterpiece by Darger was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. While the “outsider” title may no longer hold true or seem to be needed, we should never forget that Darger was the quintessential outsider. Not just an outsider to the world of art, but also an alienated outsider to society and an escapist from reality.

He rejected everyday life solely to embellish his own fantasy Realms of Unreal.The apartment contained a wealth of art supplies, reference works and other “source materials.” Coloring books, children’s storybooks, newspapers, magazines . . . things he culled from the rubbish in back alleyways and brought home, usable images he clipped out, classified and pasted into scrapbooks.

The overwhelming majority are pictures of young girls, but there are also photos of fires and whirlwinds, anything and everything that served to help visualize events in his Realms of Unreal. These he would collage and trace, whatever it took to get the Realms in his head down on paper.

He spent all his time at it.While people create art in the passage back and forth between the everyday reality and imagined unreality, in Darger’s case the two were inseparably conjoined. Rather than dwell in the merciless emptiness of reality, he added a rich succor of imaginings to his circumstances, and lived his Realms of Unreal within the confines of his room. An eccentric life of producing eccentric art, both took place in these quarters.

This book is compiled with two series of photographic records: Keizo Kitajima accompanied Inuhiko Yomota to cover Darger’s apartment for the magazine Asahi Journal in 1999, the very last time the room was photographed before its contents were removed. Kiyoko Lerner kindly let us use the old photos from the 1970s, rare images taken when the apartment was being cleaned not long after Darger’s death.

Were it not for Nathan Lerner, none of us should know anything at all about the world of Henry Darger. Unless outsider art is discovered by some third party, it all too quickly disappears. Darger’s works would not have survived without the intuitive insight of this photographer and superb industrial designer. A favorite pupil of Moholy-Nagy and eminent instructor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, how must this intellectual have felt upon accidentally becoming the accidental trustee of this wholly irrational outsider’s worldly effects?

Yukiko Koide (publisher)