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What really grates, however, is Bonesteel’s absurdly elevated comparisons to artists such as Joseph Cornell and Picasso. Cornell was an eccentric in some respects (not socially dysfunctional however), but he did not possess the tunnel vision obsessiveness that starts to become so wearisome with Darger. Cornell had a sublime poetic sense that combined with a highly sophisticated and varied group of ideas that worked on many levels. And he was an innovator. Cornell’s boxes introduced a whole new art form into the 20th century. Formally, Darger’s work, at best, is in keeping with Postimpressionism.
It is Darger’s crippled notion of subject that makes him a minor artist and no amount of critical pumping is going to put him on the level of Edvard Munch and others. In part, it is their intellectual awareness of their times and Darger’s lack of it that separates them.
