Outside In.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Outsider Art style; painter Henry Darger - Brief Article

Here's a detail from "After Marcocina," by Henry Darger (1892-1973), currently one of the art world's hottest stars. Darger's bizarre works will inaugurate Manhattan's new Museum of American Folk Art in December, further mainstreaming so-called Outsider Art. That exploding category includes work, often naive, by self-taught "eccentrics." Darger's watercolors have sold for as much as $60,000 and have been widely displayed (this one is held by the Smithsonian). There's an unpublished 1,200-page study of Darger by a Princeton scholar, and Hollywood is mulling over a biopic.

Darger is in many ways the perfect demented outsider. A reclusive obsessive who talked to himself in different voices, his mural-size paintings illustrate a sadistic 15,000-page fantasy about a war between soldiers and child hermaphrodites, The Story of the Vivian Girls. The text and images were discovered by Darger's Chicago...