A federal jury is soon expected to decide who legally owns the artwork and writings of Henry Darger, more than 50 years after the death of the North Side hermit. The work is estimated to be worth millions of dollars.
This week, U.S District Court Judge Thomas Durkin set a March 8, 2027 date for a jury trial, expected to last about a week.
“A case filed in 2022 deserves to get a trial date,” Durkin told the attorneys in the case Thursday.
Darger died April 13, 1973, leaving behind a one-room Lincoln Park apartment at 851 W. Webster Ave., crammed with broken furniture, old record players and other debris he’d plucked from garbage cans. But beneath the trash, lay an extraordinary trove of his life’s work: hundreds of watercolors, collage paintings and, in a trunk, a 15,000-page typed fantasy novel titled “In the Realms of the Unreal.”
Darger never married. He had no children. He was an unknown artist in his lifetime. His landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, took possession of Darger’s works after, in failing health, he moved out of the apartment and into a Catholic nursing home. Kiyoko Lerner, who now lives in Japan, has testified that Darger told her husband that he no longer wanted his art and that Nathan Lerner could have it.
That artwork is now worth millions. Darger is considered among the world’s greatest “outsider” or self-taught artists. Over several decades, Kiyoko Lerner (Nathan Lerner died in 1997) has sold, reproduced, donated, exhibited and licensed countless Darger works, including selling at least 22 pieces to the American Folk Art Museum in New York for a total of $1 million in 2000.
The Art Institute of Chicago, the Intuit Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York all own Darger pieces.
But Darger left no written will. And so in 2022, a group of people claiming to be distant Darger relatives filed suit in federal court, arguing, among other things, that they are the rightful owners of Darger’s works, trademarks and numerous copyrights.
One of the potential heirs, Kristin Klein, spoke to the Sun-Times shortly after the federal suit was filed in 2022. Klein was living in Connecticut at the time.
Works by Chicago artist Henry Darger, courtesy of Robert A. Roth, displayed at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in 2008. The mixed media creations are titled “Cat Headed Blengian,” left, and “Spangled Winged Tuskorhorian Blengin.” The reclusive writer-artist died in 1973 at age 81.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
“I kind of think that us being relatives, yeah, we deserve part of his estate,” Klein said in 2022. “Just because we weren’t around when he was alive doesn’t mean that people who weren’t related to him deserve to have his entire estate. It should have gone to family to begin with.”
Darger’s state of mind in his declining years will likely come into play during the trial. Alan Jay Mandel, an attorney for the would-be heirs, told Judge Durkin Thursday that he is considering having a mental-health expert testify at trial.
In pre-trial court filings, attorneys for the potential heirs point to, among other things, Darger’s death certificate, which lists “senility” as a cause of death. Durkin has said in a written ruling in the case that the senility diagnosis is relevant, but that “the certificate does not establish as a matter of law that Darger lacked the capacity to make a gift.”
The trial will certainly attract attention from across the artworld, particularly among representatives of art galleries and museums that have Darger pieces in their collections.
One person who won’t be there is Ron Slattery, who died earlier this year.
Originally from Chicago, Slattery was a vintage photography collector. He and his wife, Fawn Slattery, were the ones who originally tracked down a potential Darger relative in 2019 to alert her to her possible claim to Darger’s art and writings.
The Slatterys told the Sun-Times back in 2022 that they had never met the Lerners but felt the former landlords shouldn’t profit from Darger’s talent. The Lerners’ supporters have said that Darger would likely have remained unknown without the Lerners’ help in preserving and putting his artwork and writings out into the world.