HENRY DARGER'S ROOM 851 WEBSTER
Yukiko Koide, Kyoichi Tsuzuki [Editors]
Yukiko Koide, Kyoichi Tsuzuki [Editors]: HENRY DARGER'S ROOM 851 WEBSTER. Tokyo: Imperial Press, 2007. Second impression, 2008. Text in English and Japanese. Oblong quarto. Paper covered boards decorated in thermographic black. Gray endpapers. 111 pp. Color and black and white photography, itemized listings and short essays. Rear panel with small scuff to gray paper [see scan]. Spine heel gently pushed, so a nearly fine copy.
8 x 6.5-inch hardcover Photobook with 11 pages of short texts and color and black and white photography byNathan Lerner, David Beglund, Keizo Kitajima, Jessica Yu, and Kiyoko Lerner. Henry Darger’s Room, 851 Webster is an elegant hardback edition published in Japan with both English and Japanese text. The book includes more than 50 photographs of Darger’s living space as well as an essay by Darger scholar, John M. MacGregor. The book opens with comments by Kiyoko Lerner, who with her late husband Nathan, owned 851 Webster. Thoughtful observations by Outsider art authority Yukiko Koide concludes this volume with a description of her visit to Darger’s apartment in 1990. Their voices add dimension to this intimate publication.
Henry Darger’s Room, 851 Webster is the first effort by Yukiko Koide and Kyoichi Tsuzuki for their newly created Imperial Press. Koide is an independent curator, art dealer, and the leading expert on international Outsider art in Japan. She is responsible for introducing the works of many Outsider masters, including Henry Darger, to the Japanese public. Kyoichi Tsuzuki is known throughout Japan for his challenging and provocative books on Japanese interiors. His groundbreaking work, Tokyo Style, shattered the Western myth that the Japanese live in Zen-like spaces by documenting the small, cramped, and jam-packed apartments of Tokyo.
Henry Darger’s Room, 851 Webster is a thoughtfully conceived book and an important contribution to the discourse on 20th century Outsider art. It captures the world Darger inhabited and makes public the place where he gave birth to yet another world that transcends imagination and fantasy.
Henry Darger (1892 – 1973) lived in a vast and turbulent world. A world filled with children, war, tragedy, fantastic guardian creatures, flowers, color, hope, and despair. Yet this world, exceedingly vivid as well as feverishly detailed, existed only on paper and in one small room. This room is the subject of Henry Darger’s Room, 851 Webster.
Darger has received considerable attention over the last few years. In many ways, when one tries to comprehend Darger, there are always more questions than answers. Yet most questions about this impassioned artist/writer will never be resolved. He remains an enigma. This book though has information about Darger that is unambiguous. It is a fact that he lived in this room for the last forty years of his life and this is where his writing and works of visual art were discovered shortly after his death.
Darger’s room was like an artist installation or a three dimensional collage. Every possible surface of his space was covered; piles were everywhere. The photographs have a daunting intensity similar to what one observes in Darger’s own art works. But this book is not about a work of art, rather it reveals a profoundly personal home.
Everything Darger cared about was in his room - children’s books, religious statues, records that were played on an antiquated phonograph, all types of art supplies, a beloved chair and his solid Remington typewriter. Yet what is most compelling to view is the enormous number of images that consume the room. Almost all the images Darger chose are faces, children’s faces. Some of these are works of his own creation, others cut from discarded magazines found in the trash. His room was an evocative composite that reflected a remarkably defined and intensely focused vision. [Scott Rothstein]