[music playing] [music playing] CRAIG BENZINE: This is a re-creation of the one-room apartment that Henry Darger lived and worked in for close to 40 years.

From the early part of the 20th century until his death in 1973, Henry Darger filled this room with an enormous number of paintings and illustrations, collage drawings, and volumes of writings, including a memoir and a novel that's over 15,000 pages long.

And no one knew anything about it until after his death.

CRAIG BENZINE: This is Debra Kerr, executive director of Intuit, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Nothing, nothing, this is all secret.

He never intended anyone, as far as we know, to see it.

As a matter of fact, on his deathbed, he told his landlord to throw it all away.

[music playing] CRAIG BENZINE: Of course, his art wasn't all thrown away.

After his death, Henry Darger's landlord started to throw it out.

But they recognized the value in it and saved it.

And now, some of it sits on display at Intuit in Chicago.

DEBRA KERR: We are the only nonprofit in the United States dedicated solely to exhibiting outsider art.

Outsider art is art created by people outside the mainstream, self-taught, no influence by the traditional academy of art.

I guess you could say that Henry Darger is the ultimate outsider artist.

Right, right.

We could say that.

We could say that.

CRAIG BENZINE: Henry Darger is one of the most well-known and celebrated outsider artists in the world.

His works are much sought after and routinely sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But despite this acclaim, we know very little about Darger himself.

CRAIG BENZINE: We know we worked as a janitor at a hospital most of his life.

He was deeply religious.

And he attended church on a regular basis.

But he only had one friend that we know of.

And no one knew about his work.

While he did write a memoir, it was incomplete.

So why he worked in secret is a mystery.

And the only answers we have are what can be gleaned from the art he left behind.

He was a recluse.

He lived in the real room that is recreated here for 40 years.

Everything here was in his room.

It's neater, in general, than it was in his room.

These are photographs of the room as it was found.

So you can see, there's a lot going on.

Stuff is piled up everywhere.

Lots of materials.

We actually have 50 more boxes of stuff that's not even out.

CRAIG BENZINE: I see a picture of him over here.

Looking him up, that's the only picture I saw.

Is there any other-- There's another picture that I've seen of him as a younger man, with his friend from the army.

CRAIG BENZINE: Why do you think he made it?

Why did he make this art?

DEBRA KERR: Well, we won't know for sure.

But clearly, he was compelled to create the art.

And he was compelled to write the story.

This is the way he expressed himself.

Could you tell me a little bit more about the art itself?

Well, people are sometimes shocked when they see his art.

So the story is, I think, somewhat important to understanding what the art is about.

In his early years, he started a novel called "In the Realms of the Unreal."

And then in his later years, after he came back from his year of service in World War I, he began to illustrate the story.

So think of something along the lines of Tolkien, or "Game of Thrones."

He wrote this 15,000-page novel about the Vivian Girls, his heroines, seven girls who led an army to free a group of child slaves that were being held captive by an evil army.

So it's your classic good-versus-evil story.

But when you see some of the images, they're sort of horrifying.

But when you put that in the context of here are the evils being done to the child slaves by the evil Glandelinians, and they're about to be rescued by the Vivian Girls and their good army, it's a little bit more palatable to see why he created those images.

All right, this is an interesting painting.

This is on loan from one of our board members, Bob Roth.

And I like this one to be here because you can see all three-- well, all seven, three here and four over here, of the Vivian Girls.

And they are in their army uniforms.

And here, you can see the evil Glandelinians that they're fighting against.

And I love that he has captioned it for us-- "A battle near McHollester Run."

I like this.

They all sound very Civil War to me.

"Vivian Girls fired on nearby from ambush.

But they shoot their way to safety without one being injured."

Great!

The Vivian Girls did it again.

But it's a very dramatic scene.

Here's the vestiges of the fight, the oncoming train, the girls trying to get away.

It's all very exciting.

CRAIG BENZINE: It's awesome.

DEBRA KERR: We know that he saw these young girl characters as important.

He also wrote that he thought girls were really strong, that he thought that girls were stronger than boys and that's why he made girls the head of his army, with men following these seven girls.

He had an affinity for children, obviously, and an affinity for these girls that he saw as his heroines.

Children and their safety were a big concern for Darger.

At one point, he proposed starting a children's protective society, which would help abused and neglected children get adopted into loving families.

From what we can tell from public records and his own memoirs, Darger had a tough childhood.

Both his parents died when he was young.

And he ended up in an institution.

They sent him to a place in downstate Illinois called an Asylum for Feeble Minded Children.

We would never named something that now.

And we've come a long way in terms of the effects of institutionalization on people.

And he was institutionalized there.

We know he was unhappy.

He tried to run away.

On his third attempt to run away, he successfully came back to Chicago.

We don't know how he was treated, exactly, there.

In his autobiography, he said that one time when he ran away, someone came after him on horseback and lassoed him and made him run behind the horse back to the asylum.

And we do know that there are records of other children experiencing abuse at this facility before it was closed.

This is an image of the child slaves.

Here, they're tied up.

And here's this cowboy figure on horseback.

And he is trying to lasso this girl.

And that reflects the story that he told of his own attempted escape from the asylum.

CRAIG BENZINE: It's a pretty powerful image.

DEBRA KERR: It is a powerful image.

It can be scary.

But when you put in the context of there's a story and it's illustrating a story, then that helps you realize that this is not the end.

This is a moment, a snapshot, along the story line.

CRAIG BENZINE: Do you think there was any intention of publishing, of going public with this stuff?

We don't know.

We'll never know.

It's really interesting because it's like he just did that for himself.

He did all of this just for himself.

And he didn't see any value in it.

He didn't see that it was valuable.

He taught himself to draw by tracing other images.

And in the mainstream, we might think that tracing is not valuable.

But you see him using tracing and collage.

He cut some things out and pasted them in.

Some things you can tell that he attempted to draw freehand.

So it's a very interesting mix of styles together.

CRAIG BENZINE: So do you think part of the intrigue is that it was secret while he was alive.

Do you think if he were alive and he was putting this out there, it wouldn't be as popular.

Well, certainly the secret is part of intrigue and part of the aura around these works.

But I think the works stand on their own as legitimate artworks.

And would he be as popular if he'd been pushing the works out there?

Well, he wouldn't maybe fit as neatly into the outsider art category.

I think that the reason this is pure outsider art is because he did it just for himself.

CRAIG BENZINE: So what do you guys think?

How do you think Darger's art would have been received if it had been released when he was alive?

MATT WEBER: Or what if it had been thrown away?

I mean, could it be considered art if only the artist sees it?

How do you even make the judgment of whether it's art or not?

Don't you need other people to watch it?

It's like the tree falling in the woods and no one around to hear it or see it?

To determine whether it was art or not.

Let us know in the comments.

By the way, I was around to see it.

And it did fall into the woods.

And it made a sound.

It was-- Yeah, but then you would have been there.

And then that would negate the-- But I'm dead.

Shabbalah!

[laughter] Thanks for watching.

If you liked our show, consider clicking like.

And if you want to see more, consider clicking subscribe.

And if you want to support our show, consider going to our Patreon page.

And if you hate the show, just don't even consider anything.

You don't have to do anything.

You can just go do something else like go bowling.

That sounds great.

Seems like internet's not for you.

All right, so last week, we went to Area 51.

And you had something to say about that in the comment section.

And we're going to reply to your comments right now.

Good old-fashioned question answer.

GerardDennis asked where are Areas 1 through 50.

Well, you're probably trying to make a joke.

But this is an interesting question because there's an interesting answer.

Well, Area 51 isn't its official name.

It's usually referred to by a couple names, Homey Airport in Groom Lake.

And it's part of Edwards Air Force Base.

It was referred to as Area 51 in the CIA document from the Vietnam War.

And that might have something to do with the Atomic Energy Commission's grid numbering system of the area.

According to Wikipedia, it's adjacent to Area 15, which, I guess, could mean that the CIA made a typo when they were talking about it.

But in the end, we're not really sure why it's called Area 51.

CRAIG BENZINE: It's a secret.

Yeah, it's a secret.

A lot of you had good suggestions for why we like secrets.

Yeah.

You know?

We like the unknown.

We like the limitless possibility.

Yeah, not knowing gives you possibility.

You can make up your own answer.

And who doesn't love that?

Yeah, and sometimes the answer could be boring.

Yeah, and I'd rather not have the answer.

I just want my own imagination to run wild.

And that way, you're not wrong, too.

Why do you like secrets?

Are you interested in secrets?

I mean, I like secrets, I guess.

And what I think secrets are, and I think they are a distillation of curiosity.

And when we're talking about secrets, we're talking about wanting answers.

We want truth.

And that's what we're looking for when there's a secret.

We want to know the truth of that secret.

But there's an opposite side of that, which we've already talked about, is that when we don't know what the truth is, we make up our own truth.

And that can be like we're making up meaning.

We're giving this empty spot, this missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, we're giving it meaning by making up our own truth.

So we're playing god.

Sort of, or making god to fill in that space.

Sort of like the show "Lost," the whole show was a secret.

And once they revealed the answer, it sucked, according to me.

Yeah, if you're going to watch that show, I mean, you can probably stop after season 2.

Yeah, just live with the secret.

Just live in the secret.

Next week, we'll be talking about one of the biggest secrets in the universe.

The recipe for Coca-Cola?

No, but that's a good one.

Dark matter.

Yeah, dark matter, what is it?

Where is it?

Well, we know it's in space.

But we don't know what it is.

And we're trying to detect it.

We're trying to find out.

That's what we do.

[music playing]