“Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 21, features works by 12 artists who have been inspired by Henry Darger (1892–1973), the extraordinarily prolific, weird, and affecting “outsider artist” from Chicago. The story has been often told of how Darger lived in the same apartment for more than 40 years, and it wasn’t until 1973, when he went to live in a nursing home, that his landlords discovered his magnum opus, bearing the unlikely — prolific, weird, affecting — title “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.” In more than 15,000 pages of prose and illustrations, Darger presents us with words and images alternately storybook-charming and disturbing, even appalling, in their mix of prepubescent sexuality and graphic violence — a surefire recipe for success in today’s culture.

But there is much more to Darger’s work, some of which is illuminated by the most important artist to pay homage to Darger, the poet John Ashbery, who likens Darger to the reclusive early 20thcentury surrealist poet Raymond Roussel. Mr. Ashbery’s “Girls on the Run” takes off from the Vivian girls, and his “History of My Life” bears the same title as Darger’s autobiography (yet another mammoth work he composed). I don’t find it hard to see why Ashbery would have been fascinated by Darger. Darger, in the manner of the surrealists, took the verbal and pictorial flotsam and jetsam of modern life and molded it into a spooky, richly textured narrative.

Darger’s graphic work is justly prized for its vibrant coloration. Robyn O’Neil, one of the “Dargerists,” draws haunting tableaux of escape narratives, but achieves her epic effects entirely through graphite on paper. She shows bodies falling or suspended in vaporous voids, with swirling mists much like those that transfix us in Darger’s pictures. Trenton Doyle Hancock’s “And the Branches Became as Storm Clouds” (2003) uses mixed media on canvas, including tufts of furry fabric in pink, black, and white to illustrate a narrative. Grayson Perry’s ceramic “Black Dog” uses black and light green glazes depicting little girls in ominous situations, together with pasted-on printed images — a Madonna and Child, Princess Diana, pinups. It’s oddly affecting. Amy Cutler is a wonderful illustrator, with a winsome line, who brings to what at first seem to be sweet images a true surrealist sensibility and a power to disturb that, though her graphic idiom differs markedly from that of Darger, nonetheless evokes the tensions of his work. In “Traction” (2002), we see girls pulling a house — all so delicately and jauntily rendered — through a snowy field; we don’t at first focus on the fact that they are pulling the house by their own hair.

In Ms. Cutler’s “Plotline” (2006), women dressed in black bend over, bearing ropetied bundles on their backs, while other similarly dressed women crawl or reach into doghousescale log cabins. In “Voyages” (2000), we see cutaways of different rooms in a house: children skipping rope, a spectral horse, children sailing toy boats in tubs of water in a room where pigs hang from the ceiling, a room with fresh-baked, chocolate-iced cakes covering all the counters and the floor, a girl in bed observed by a spectral horse, and two girls trying with all their might to rein in a horse crashing through the floor to the room below, while a bonfire roars behind. It is a house where every room contains or is contained by a dream. Ms. Cutler is the most Dargeresque of all the artists here.

Justin Lieberman, in untitled works from 2004 and 2005, uses mixed media on paper in — again — oddly affecting ways. He takes reproductions of actual Darger backgrounds, with their glowing vegetation and roiling clouds, Photoshops out their foreground figures, and substitutes collages of girls whose nude bodies come from Jock Sturges photographs and whose heads come from photos of contestants in preteen beauty pageants. Other artists in the show include Anthony Goicolea, Paula Rego, Jefferson Friedman, Yun-Fei Ji, Justine Kurland, and Michael St. John.

Several examples of Darger’s own work are on view, too. They show his partiality for the spectrum of green in fields and forests, and for Japanese clouds. The images abound — explode — in bright flowers, voluptuous trees, tied-up girls, running girls, flying girls, a gruesomely hanged girl, bathing girls, rope-skipping girls, girls with horns and tails, rifle-wielding girls, clouds and more clouds, and — in Darger’s way of putting it — “great conflarrations.” Oh, and did I mention the girls have boys’ genitalia?

Best of all is a little side exhibit showing pictorial items found among Darger’s effects and, like his own works, part of the permanent holdings of the American Folk Art Museum. We see newspaper ads (movie ads, fashion ads), magazine illustrations, holy cards (Darger went to Catholic Mass up to five times a day), coloring book pages, comic strips, and a quite disturbing Saturday Evening Post illustration of a frightened girl recoiling from a man, the back of whose suit fills the foreground. There are also illustrated books beloved by Darger — including “The Divine Comedy” with Doré’s illustrations. In the end Darger gives us a combination of comic strip, Doré, and Hokusai, a rich brew the other artists may not be able to match, though the spirit of Darger imbues their work, and Amy Cutler comes very close.

Until September 21 (45 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-265-1040).