The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress Looking for Henry Darger

by Morrison, C. L.

• ISBN13: 9780374225896
• ISBN10: 0374225893
• Format: Hardcover
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

An engaging, thoroughly unconventional memoir about an engaging, thoroughly unconventional artist In 1977, C. L. Morrison, a young Chicago correspondent forArtforummagazine, was asked to curate the first exhibition of the art of the late Henry J. Darger. Darger had lived for forty years in a Chicago boarding house, working as a janitor at a local hospital, shambling around the neighborhood and digging through garbage bins. He died penniless and unknown in 1973 at the age of eighty-one, and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. But in Darger's room was a substantial legacy indeed: unfathomable quantities of watercolors that accompanied 15,000 pages of a lavish mythology that chronicled the war between the heroic Vivian Girls of Abbiennia and the ruthless Glandelinean warlords who had enslaved their little sisters. Morrison spent a summer in Darger's room, cooled by his wobbly propeller-blade fan, banging away on his Remington No. 8 manual typewriter, organizing and cataloguing the artist's watercolor scrolls, handmade books, and stacks of manuscripts. Darger is now considered the most famous of "outsider artists," and his art is worth a fortune. InThe Old Man in the Polka-dotted Dress, Morrison uses her unique experience to raise provocative questions: How is it that Darger could be a hero in death but an outcast in life? Is there an ethical way to celebrate and publicize such work? Who, in the end, gets to be called an artist?

Author Biography

C. L. Morrison is international editor of the New York Times Syndicate. She has written for Artforum, The Boston Phoenix, La Stampa, and The New York Times. A native of Chicago, she lives in New York City.