In the real world, Henry J. Darger worked as an orderly in a Chicago hospital and lived as a recluse in a cramped apartment. In his spare time he created an alternative cosmos, an extraordinary body of work which runs to 15,000 pages (nine million words) and is illustrated by hundreds of drawings, collages and watercolours. Its title is The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. In this other-universe Darger was an important figure—Captain Darger (although not the absolute hero; the seven Vivian sisters are the heroines). What’s most important to understand about it, though, is that this was an entirely private work—it was never intended for publication, or even to be read at all by anyone else.
    This is an example of what is now known as ‘outsider art’. Although that term was coined in the 1970s (as the title of a book by the English author Roger Cardinal) its origins lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a few resident psychiatrists working in lunatic asylums in central Europe began to take an interest in their patients’ drawings, rather than just routinely throwing them out. The likes of Picasso and Klee explored these outer fringes too, in their search for new ways of doing art; the Surrealists were inspired by it; from the 1940s onwards it was championed (as ‘l'art brut’) by Jean Dubuffet. Today it’s gaining a much wider audience.
    Outsider art is art from outside the artistic mainstream, art still not even recognised as art by many. It is art produced by the inmates of lunatic asylums/psychiatric institutions; by the inmates of ordinary prisons; by spiritualist ‘mediums’; by people with unusual (often religious) beliefs; by the socially isolated; by artistically untrained creative obsessives; by eccentrics. It is produced by people living on the margins of society, excluded not just from mainstream art but from society itself by dysfunctional personalities, grinding poverty, class or lack of education. It can include paintings and drawings, writings, photographs, music, sculptures, weird machines, even architecture; from simple pages covered with scribbles, to meticulously executed architectural blueprints. Some (for instance the Watts Towers in Los Angeles) have become famous. These works are, in Colin Rhodes’s words, ‘spontaneous expressive outpourings from the well-springs of creativity, unmuddied by artistic training or received knowledge’; and this book is a good general introduction to the subject.
    As more comes to light about the lives of the artists themselves, this art is becoming more comprehensible too. Take Henry Darger for instance: at four his mother died; then his younger sister was given away for adoption; at twelve, though perfectly intelligent, he was sent to an Asylum for Feebleminded Children where he was beaten routinely and from which he escaped aged seventeen. He lived the majority of the rest of his life alone, and The Vivian Girls was only discovered (by accident by his landlord) not long before his death in 1973. Darger collected newspaper clippings about lost, kidnapped and murdered children, and incorporated these children into his story: it’s as if he was trying—by adopting them almost—to transfer them from our horrible world into his own universe where they’d be safe. ( )