Willem van Genk (April 2, 1927 – May 12, 2005) was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, celebrated as one of the leading masters of Outsider Art.
[7] Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States, was presented from September 10 through November 30, 2014, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.
In school Willem was a poor student, except in art; playing to his strength, he preferred to doodle throughout the day instead of paying attention in class.
"[14] This trauma was the origin of van Genk's later obsession with long raincoats, as the Gestapo men on this occasion wore "high-buttoned leather jackets.
As though appropriating their cloaks of power, van Genk would eventually collect hundreds of long raincoats, which he treated as a sort of fetish, a prophylactic protecting the paranoid artist against what he thought of as the ubiquitous threat of his enemies.
[16] Eventually, after years in a lodging house, van Genk moved in with his sister Willy in The Hague in 1964, and stayed put after her death in 1973, living alone for all but the end of the rest of his life in this modest dwelling in the Harmelenstraat.
At the director's suggestion van Genk was allowed to take his own path at the academy, and consequently he remained an autodidact.
His art through 1960 was devoted to relatively straightforward panoramic depictions of cityscapes, views that the artist culled from the printed material he perused, such as travel guides, postcards, and magazines.
[29] He was included in Nederlandse Naieve Kunst (“Dutch Naïve Art”), a volume surveying fourteen figures, with van Genk's work represented by three color reproductions.
In 1984 he was included in the World Encyclopedia of Naïve Art, with almost a full-page reproduction of his painting Madrid, which the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne acquired the same year along with a second work, “50 Years of the Soviet Union,” for “2,500 and 3,000 guilders respectively,” relatively modest sums which angered the artist against his dealer Nico Van Der Endt.
By 1995 he was becoming increasingly withdrawn, a recluse holed up in his apartment, where he was the subject of many complaints from his neighbors, who objected to the awful smells and loud nocturnal “thumping” emanating therefrom.
After three months, van Genk was released and allowed to return home, but his apartment, which had been such a peculiar live-in Gesamtkunstwerk, had been drastically transformed by cleaning, to the violated artist's chagrin.
Not long thereafter, the police again involuntarily seized van Genk, who was placed under ‘compulsory psychiatric treatment for a maximum of six months because he was charged for the “nuisance caused to neighbors.”’[36] The approbation of the art world had not entailed the wider social acceptance of this troubled, difficult figure.
The retrospective exhibition that Van Berkum's monograph accompanied opened at De Stadshof (now defunct) in Zwolle the following year in 1998, then travelled to Bönnigheim and Lausanne.
In 1998, as the De Stadshof Museum was negotiating the purchase of ten works by Willem van Genk for the impressive sum of 225,000 guilders (in anticipation of the retrospective exhibition and book publication), the artist himself was committed to a nursing home.
In his rather polemical study Plokker denies the ability of the mentally ill to make real art, which Plokker argues presupposes an “integrated personality.”[40] The severity of this judgment, which takes refuge in incredibly neat distinctions between the sick and healthy, goaded van Genk on, worsening his persecution complex yet motivating him to disprove his enemies by creating his art.
[41] Even before his traumatic adolescent incident at the hands of the Gestapo, young Willem had great difficulty learning in certain subjects, yet some perceived his remarkably tangled talent.
But if he had good reason to feel himself persecuted by powerful figures and bureaucracies, the consequence was undeniably a maladjusted, antisocial paranoia, such that, to cite the most striking example, his apartment was discovered carpeted by a layer of dog excrement.
The sight of long hair in frothy shampoo arouse(d) sexual feelings that he ha(d) difficulty keeping under control…”[43] The following year in 1988 van Genk made a painting called The Hairdresser's Salon, a composite image divided by a grid into 32 equally sized squares, with macabre imagery suggesting, in conjunction with his revealing comment, a fear of women.
Furthermore, it was only the paintings and drawings which were made with the idea of public exhibition in mind: the trolleybuses and raincoat hoard were, on the contrary, private projects, qualifying as Outsider Art even in accordance with LACMA's exclusive definition.
[12] Later in the artist's career he adopted a modernist syntax of fragmentation, often cutting up pictures and recombining them in composite images distinguished by a jumpy, visual staccato.
Several “painted boards or sheets of different sizes, put and held together with small nails and tape” were thus brought together to constitute a single composite work.
[55] While this montage technique of composition is by no means unique either to van Genk or artists struggling with debilitating mental illness (Willem de Kooning, for example, did something similar), in his case it is especially suggestive, as this fragmented syntax may be thought to parallel the symptoms of schizophrenia.
The artist incorporated images from other visual media into his collages: advertising copy, waste materials, and cuts of paper from travel brochures and history books.
Composing with the different elements of the modern metropolis, the artist assumed a position of mastery, as if exercising an omnipotent supervision over the city and all its economic, social, and political processes.
It seems as though van Genk thought that the Gestapo's power to harm was an emanation of their costumes, and that he sought to protect himself from the dangers of the world by appropriating their outerwear.
For this latter reason he referred to himself as “King of Stations.” This title, designating a ruler, points to the theme of power, which has assumed a singular importance in the literature on the artist.
The 1944 incident with the Gestapo must have been especially terrifying in van Genk's case, since the Nazis were killing mentally disabled people like him starting in October 1939.
“The image of the locomotive,” he writes, “has an unmistakably sexual import: a powerful, gleaming black monster with fire inside, pumping its pistons and ejaculating hot, white steam.”[46] Van Genk, with abundant personal reasons to hate and fear Fascism, initially admired Communism as its putative opposite.
[24] When Nico Van Der Endt, who became the artist's dealer and closest associate, first encountered the work, he thought it was inimitable, before remembering Kafka's The Trial: "A tightly packed, teeming, and gloomy cityscape.