Illustrations by Henry Darger on display at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago.

 The legal battle over the lucrative legacy of outsider artist Henry Darger has taken a new turn. A distant relative of the artist and the Estate of Henry Joseph Darger have filed a legal action against Darger’s former landlords, who have been the longtime stewards of the artist’s work. They are accused of copyright infringement, among a slew of other wrongdoing.

The suit alleges that Kiyoko Lerner and her late husband Nathan have for decades been illegally profiting from Darger’s art and writings, including his famed 15,000-page illustrated manuscript, “In the Realms of the Unreal,” despite no credible evidence of ownership.

In 1972, Darger, a retired Chicago custodian moved out of his rented one-bedroom apartment of 40 years to St. Augustine’s Home for the Aged. When the Lerners, his landlords, came to empty the room, they found hundreds of drawings, watercolors, and collages collected in haphazardly constructed albums. Darger died a year later at age 81. Shortly after his death, the Lerners began promoting and selling his work.

For nearly 40 years, the Lerners have claimed that Darger left the contents of his apartment to Nathan in a verbal agreement sometime in 1972; Nathan subsequently gave them to Kiyoko, they said. They also claimed that when Darger was preparing to move into the nursing home, they asked him if he would like to keep anything in his apartment. In their telling, Darger replied, “I have nothing I need in the room. It is all yours. You can throw everything away.” Their promotion of his work is credited with Darger’s posthumous celebration as a visionary outsider artist.