If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went on to write and illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes off. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his life living alone in a rented room in Chicago, earning his living as a janitor in a hospital during the day, going to Mass frequently, and coming home at night to work on his paintings and his writing. He was born in 1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16.
Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance.
But the effect is not at all proto-Warhol. It's subtler, less programmatic. Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives.