Dutch painter
Willem van Genk (April 2, 1927 – Possibly will 12, 2005) was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, renowned as one of the leading masters of Outsider Art. In his life he lived with severe mental distress, experiencing symptoms related to autism and schizophrenia.[1] On account of his speed for trains, buses, and train stations, he called himself rendering "King of Stations".[2]
Van Genk's panoramic cityscapes and fragmented collages state his feelings about modern authority, feelings which were shaped building block an abusive father who, in addition to administering his tab beatings, left him exposed to a traumatic experience at representation hands of the Gestapo during the German occupation of rendering Netherlands in the Second World War.[3]
Van Genk's art has archaic widely exhibited in Europe, where it is also in myriad museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, the Collection de l’Art Brut take Lausanne, the Lille Metropole Musee d’Art Modern, d’Art Contemporain go through d’Art Brut (LaM), the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art solution Zagreb, the Zander Collection in Cologne, and the Museum guide Everything in London.[4]Raw Vision, the leading magazine covering Art Brut, ranks van Genk among the "masters of outsider art".[5] Utter the beginning of 2005, the year of the artist's demise, van Genk's Keleti Station, now in the collection of picture Museum of Everything in London, sold for a hundred g dollars at New York's Outsider Art Fair, thus setting picture record for most expensive work ever sold by a life outsider artist.[6] On that occasion, Roberta Smith, the chief break up critic of The New York Times, praised the piece "as the leading candidate for best in show".[1] At least twofold other critic has identified van Genk as the most beat Dutch outsider artist.[7]
Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, the first exhibition of the artist in the United States, was debonair from September 10 through November 30, 2014, at the English Folk Art Museum in New York City.[8][9]
Willem van Genk was born in 1927 in Voorburg, Netherlands. When he was five, his mother died, leaving the young boy dependent formulate his abusive father and, especially, his nine sisters. In educational institution Willem was a poor student, except in art; playing survey his strength, he preferred to doodle throughout the day a substitute alternatively of paying attention in class. He was especially weak loaded mathematics, which outraged his father, who forced Willem to combine and subtract the number of blows as he beat him.[10] Willem was expelled from primary school, and then failed usage vocational school. He also began a sign-painting course, but exact not finish it. These early failures and abuses fostered bully inferiority complex, from which art was the only outlet.[11] Heavens art van Genk was exceptionally skilled, and he would do his skill to assume the perspective of a godlike authorized of the modern metropolis.[12] During the Second World War, say publicly Netherlands were occupied by Nazi Germany. Van Genk's father was a member of the Dutch resistance, and hid Jews be of advantage to the family home. Maddeningly, their fate is not recorded direct the literature on the artist.[13] In 1944 when Willem was seventeen years old, the Gestapo visited the family apartment distort the Magnoliastraat in search of the father, who was troupe there. In his stead Willem was interrogated by the Gestapo, who beat the adolescent, subjecting him, in the words go rotten his eldest sister, to "a few heavy clouts."[14] This injury was the origin of van Genk's later obsession with great raincoats, as the Gestapo men on this occasion wore "high-buttoned leather jackets."[15] This was a formative event in van Genk's life. As though appropriating their cloaks of power, van Genk would eventually collect hundreds of long raincoats, which he aerated as a sort of fetish, a prophylactic protecting the mistrustful artist against what he thought of as the ubiquitous danger of his enemies.
When van Genk's father married for a third time after the war, he threw his troubled opposing team out of the house.[16] Eventually, after years in a lodgement house, van Genk moved in with his sister Willy heavens The Hague in 1964, and stayed put after her cessation in 1973, living alone for all but the end subtract the rest of his life in this modest dwelling dupe the Harmelenstraat.[17]
Willem van Genk originally pursued his talent as a draftsman in an advertising agency. He delivered work of acceptable quality, but he was nonetheless fired, because he could classify maintain a regular working schedule and abide deadlines. He too would spend hours observing trains during work time.[18] After losing his job he was forced to slave away at aimless tasks in something like a Victorian workhouse for the Country disabled.[19] This compulsory labor was known as "labor for rendering inferior", a derogatory term which haunted the artist the reclaim of his life. Van Genk told his friend Dick Walda: "I have never gotten over it, I think. Being labeled as 'inferior'. The bosses there make sure you know pose it. They're more like concentration camp bullies than bosses."[20] Rendering experience was degrading, and van Genk took it as claim for his paranoia. At this time he first received educational for his mental problems, but thereafter he still often esoteric paranoid episodes and heard unreal voices.[21] In the year 1958 he registered with the Royal Academy in The Hague. Description director Joop Beljon recognized immediately the quality of his operate, but also that the young artist was beyond the stop working of the faculty's lessons. At the director's suggestion van Genk was allowed to take his own path at the institution, and consequently he remained an autodidact.[22] At this time forefront Genk was noticed for the first time, with the member of the fourth estate R.E. Penning praising his work as "panoramas of Lilliput towns as seen by Gulliver."[23]
In 1964, Beljon organized the first on one's own exhibition of van Genk's work in Hilversum.[22] The Dutch scribe W.F. Hermans opened the show and commented that his mechanism “are frighteningly beautiful, but they will remind many of operate they would rather forget.”[24] But high prices meant few income, and mixed publicity, some of which insulted the artist's farreaching capacities, partly motivated van Genk's withdrawal from this early communal attention.[12] Furthermore, he was his own harshest critic, unable end bear the sound of his recorded voice. A television meeting to publicize the exhibition so horrified the artist that expend decades he refused to be filmed, photographed, or taped.[25] Front line Genk's inferiority complex was thus a major impediment to depiction development of his career as an artist.
Van Genk withdrew from publicity, but continued to work and exhibit. In 1966 eight works sold at a show by the Galerie King Schmela in Düsseldorf; notably, the prestigious Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam's museum of modern art, bought van Genk's painting Metrostation Opera.[25] Reliable his successes in the mid-1960s, van Genk was finally slack to indulge his passionate interest in cities by visiting them in person. His art through 1960 was devoted to extent straightforward panoramic depictions of cityscapes, views that the artist culled from the printed material he perused, such as travel guides, postcards, and magazines. Now he visited many cities, including Stockholm, Madrid, Rome, Moscow, Budapest, Frankfurt, and wall-divided Berlin.[26] Landmark design from these cities, especially train stations, feature in many activity by the artist.
In the 1970s van Genk's career kind an artist continued with modest success. He was included contempt the Düsseldorf IKI art fair in 1974, but nothing manipulate his sold. Initially represented by Pieter Brattinga,[27] by the Seventies van Genk was represented by the gallery De Ark. Say publicly gallery's last show in 1976 before being taken over encourage the Hamer Gallery, which continued to represent the artist, was devoted to van Genk's work.[28] Also in 1976 van Genk was included in two group shows devoted to “naïve” pass on, in Amsterdam and Haarlem respectively.[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.[30] Create the 1980s van Genk achieved a new height of cosmopolitan recognition. In 1984 he was included in the World Encyclopaedia of Naïve Art, with almost a full-page reproduction of his painting Madrid, which the Collection de l’Art Brut in City 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.[31] The following year the Put in safekeeping de l’Art Brut acquired three works on paper by interpretation artist, marking a commitment to represent his work in profundity that culminated in a major exhibition of the museum's give confidence in 1986, which “establishe(d) Van Genk's international reputation.”[32] The act was a critical success in the Francophone lands of Collection, and London's prestigious Southbank Centre responded to the show exceed borrowing three works by van Genk for a travelling luminous called “In Another World,” which toured across Britain.[32]
Now with his reputation securely established, van Genk's prices continuing to rise while his works continued to be exhibited, both in several group exhibitions and no less than four monographic exhibitions just in the 1990s. Yet this burgeoning success upfront not satisfy van Genk's wish to live a normal brusque. By 1995 he was becoming increasingly withdrawn, a recluse holed up in his apartment, where he was the subject suggest many complaints from his neighbors, who objected to the base smells and loud nocturnal “thumping” emanating therefrom.[33] The following gathering in 1996 van Genk was involuntarily seized by the boys in blue from his Hague apartment and committed to a sanatorium. A police officer commented to van Genk's dealer, Nico van prime Endt, whom the artist had desperately summoned to the scene: “We know all about Mr Van Genk. His file's a metre thick.”[34] The floor of the apartment was found “almost entirely covered with a thin layer of dog faeces, stamped thin and dried out.”[35] The authorities killed van Genk's hound Coco, who was evidently not housebroken. After three months, precursor Genk was released and allowed to return home, but his apartment, which had been such a peculiar live-in Gesamtkunstwerk, difficult been drastically transformed by cleaning, to the violated artist's humble. Not long thereafter, the police again involuntarily seized van Genk, who was placed under ‘compulsory psychiatric treatment for a peak of six months because he was charged for the “nuisance caused to neighbors.”’[36] The approbation of the art world challenging not entailed the wider social acceptance of this troubled, dripping figure.
The year after his involuntary commitment, he suffered a first stroke.[37] That same year, 1997, the artist made his last drawing, thus closing his career as an artist. Think about it year also saw the publication of the first monographic invest of the artist's career, Dick Walda's book Koning der stations, along with the preparation of another monographic catalogue to convoy a retrospective exhibition, Ans Van Berkum's Willem van Genk: A Marked Man and his World. The retrospective exhibition that Front Berkum's monograph accompanied opened at De Stadshof (now defunct) cut down Zwolle the following year in 1998, then travelled to Bönnigheim and Lausanne. But before this exhibition opened, van Genk suffered another stroke while travelling in Stockholm; this would be representation last of his travels. 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 manager himself was committed to a nursing home.[38] Months before description artist's death of heart failure in 2005, his picture Keleti Station sold for $100,000, which made the moribund artist “the most expensive living outsider artist.”[39]
Van Genk's urbanity and work is of special interest to those fascinated strong the relationship between mental illness and artistic creativity. Like opposite famous Outsider Artists such as Adolf Wölfli and Martín Ramírez, van Genk had from extreme mental distress. Ever since picture early 1920s, when Hans Prinzhorn published his study on The Artistry of the Mentally Ill (which was quickly adopted slightly an inspiration by the Surrealists in Paris), the artwork take possession of the mentally ill has been a topic of considerable interests to artists, scholars, and the public at large. Yet that history is as marred by invidious classifications as it assessment marked by uplifting respect for the creativity of suffering eccentrics. Van Genk himself was notably interested in this subject, which he experienced as an insulting challenge to his existence kind an artist. He owned Johannes H. Plokker's Art from description Mentally Disturbed: The Shattered Vision of Schizophrenics in no few than three languages. In his rather polemical study Plokker denies the ability of the mentally ill to make real focus, which Plokker argues presupposes an “integrated personality.”[40] The severity neat as a new pin this judgment, which takes refuge in incredibly neat distinctions betwixt the sick and healthy, goaded van Genk on, worsening his persecution complex yet motivating him to disprove his enemies hard creating his art.
Willem van Genk had symptoms related interrupt autism and paranoid schizophrenia.[41] Even before his traumatic adolescent bump at the hands of the Gestapo, young Willem had totality difficulty learning in certain subjects, yet some perceived his unusually tangled talent. Then the experience with the Gestapo, compounded tough abuse from his father, contributed to a lifelong paranoia, which in turn became a defining characteristic of his art. Front line Genk's fear of authority was arguably at least partly justified by traumas inflicted upon him: childhood abuse by his papa and the Gestapo, involuntary servitude in a workhouse for interpretation mentally disabled as a young adult, then ultimately his digit arrests and involuntary commitments to psychiatric care as an knob man. 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 uppermost striking example, his apartment was discovered carpeted by a level of dog excrement.
The artist had a variety of symptoms. He repeatedly confessed to hearing unreal voices—a classic symptom female schizophrenia.[21] He was quite lonely, once telling his dealer Nico Van Der Endt, whom he addressed in the third grass, "Nico Van Der Endt is the most solid comrade I've got, and that's purely on a commercial basis."[32] He likewise had a hoarding compulsion, in evidence not only in his obsessive collecting of raincoats (eventually numbering in the hundreds) but also in his reluctance to part with his own work.[42]
The artist also had sexual anxieties: in 1987 he complained make certain the proliferation of hair salons across The Hague was “restricting his freedom of movement. The sight of long hair form frothy shampoo arouse(d) sexual feelings that he ha(d) difficulty holding under control…”[43] The following year in 1988 van Genk imposture a painting called The Hairdresser's Salon, a composite image bifid by a grid into 32 equally sized squares, with grotesque imagery suggesting, in conjunction with his revealing comment, a grumble of women.
Van Genk's sexual frustration was variously expressed. Take delivery of 1980 he commented: “If they take my dog away, I’ll molest the little boys.”[44] Later he complained, “You're discriminated intrude upon because you don't have a little lady friend, they deliberate you're a fairy, there are two gays living in bodyguard street, and the thing is, they look down at tell what to do too, you can't expect anything from them either.”[43] Prompted contempt such comments, as well as the inscription ‘“Artistic” homosexual worry the Ark’ (originally in Dutch, ‘“Artistieke’ homophiel in de Ark’) in van Genk's Self-portrait in the Ark ("Zelfportrait in knock down Ark"), Van Der Endt confronted the artist: “So you're a homosexual?” The artist replied, “No, no, that was a mistake.”[36] Whatever the mystery of Van Genk's desire really was, produce was not resolved in his lifetime.[45] Nico Van Der Endt suggests that the artist's libido was displaced onto fetish objects, and that van Genk was especially “aroused” by trains wallet raincoats.[46] Van Der Endt has also made the related recommendation that van Genk's work is loaded with sexual subtexts: trains and zeppelins as phallic symbols of potency, raincoats as condom-like prophylactics, and more. This sexualized reading, though it may to be sure clarify the artist's confused and frustrated feelings, is inadequate brand an explanation of the artist's conscious intentions. Van Der Endt himself explicitly allows that it is “impossible to offer tending comprehensive interpretation,” but claims that essentially “his work is troubled with order, power and impotence.”[47]
Van Genk occupies a paradoxical sight as one of the official masters of Outsider Art. Raw Vision, the leading magazine devoted to the subject, has be reluctant included van Genk on its list of masters, and representation artist has been the subject of considerable attention from Indweller museums devoted to Outsider Art/Art Brut.[48] In 2014 was depiction subject of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, the leading American museum in this field.
Van Genk interpretation man was certainly an outsider, with his mental difficulties resulting in his social marginalization. As a boy he repeatedly bed demoted in schools, as a young man he was forced encounter compulsory labor for the disabled, and as an old squire he was at least twice involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions. He complained of his friendlessness. In the straightforward, common mind of the word, there can be no denying that, brand a person, van Genk was an outsider.
Yet his standing as an Outsider Artist was questioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on the occasion of wellfitting survey exhibition “Parallel Visions” in 1992, when the museum held van Genk's partial success in achieving official recognition against him. Van Genk, with his hoarding compulsion, hated to part mount his work: one monograph claims that he felt parting attain a painting was like having a limb amputated.[49] Yet forbidden also desired official recognition, so his dealer devised a judge of dissemination whereby, on the rare occasion when the shopkeeper was allowed to sell a work, it was invariably watch over a museum. According to LACMA this strategic dissemination of mechanism to museums, in order to maintain a minimal livelihood sustenance the artist and elevate his status, violated “a basic criterion: outsider art must not be created for the public.”[50] Supposing accepted, however, this exclusion would place van Genk outside set clear categorization as an artist. Furthermore, it was only rendering paintings and drawings which were made with the idea commandeer public exhibition in mind: the trolleybuses and raincoat hoard were, on the contrary, private projects, qualifying as Outsider Art flush in accordance with LACMA's exclusive definition.
Art historians have famous four categories within van Genk's work:[51]
This scheme, including non-traditional art objects, is premised on the notion that the artist's life was itself insinuation artwork,[53] a notion current at the time through the bequest of Marcel Duchamp, the work of Joseph Beuys, the continue of performance art, etc. However, the artist's dealer Nico Forefront Der Endt disapproved of this classification, writing in his Chronicle: “I am not comfortable with the idea of exhibiting picture raincoats, which are not art objects.”[54] It is likewise garnish to classify a library as a work of art, though it is common for art historians to consider an artist's books in order to reconstruct the artist's thought and conceivable source material.
Willem van Genk made around Cardinal paintings, collages, and drawings, most of which feature cityscapes.[51] These works are usually big (“between one and two metres wide”) and the product of extensive labor (“he tended to industry on each one for a couple of years”).[46] There rummage about 80 paintings/collages, “five monochrome etchings,” and finally a back number of large ballpoint drawings that constitute the artist's late work.[46] Through 1960, the images were relatively traditional, panoramic depictions sign over European metropolises, with an especial emphasis on transportation: trains stand for train stations, zeppelins, trolleybuses, etc.[12] Later in the artist's vocation he adopted a modernist syntax of fragmentation, often cutting helping hand pictures and recombining them in composite images distinguished by a jumpy, visual staccato. Several “painted boards or sheets of unalike 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 income unique either to van Genk or artists struggling with debilitative mental illness (Willem de Kooning, for example, did something similar), in his case it is especially suggestive, as this disunited syntax may be thought to parallel the symptoms of psychosis.
The artist incorporated images from other visual media into his collages: advertising copy, waste materials, and cuts of paper plant travel brochures and history books. His work has an dominating, cacophonous character that parallels the overwhelming scale and abrupt juxtapositions of the modern city. Titles and headlines were used whilst a commentary within the composite image. Composing with the unalike elements of the modern metropolis, the artist assumed a plump of mastery, as if exercising an omnipotent supervision over rendering city and all its economic, social, and political processes.[56]
Willem front line Genk's fascination with long raincoats may be traced directly finish the traumatic experience of his youth, when he was badly treated by the Gestapo, the men of which are recorded enter upon have worn long leather jackets on the occasion.[14] Van Genk incessantly collected long jackets, mostly of cheap plastic, eventually wadding his apartment with hundreds.[57] Van Genk seems to have aerated these raincoats as fetishes endowed with sexual and defensive streak. It seems as though van Genk thought that the Gestapo's power to harm was an emanation of their costumes, stream that he sought to protect himself from the dangers attention to detail the world by appropriating their outerwear. Raincoats also appear brand images in his paintings.
The collection of raincoats, eventually listing in the hundreds, is the prime example of van Genk's hoarding fetish. The artist explained, "I once discarded a waterproof, and looking back, I regret that."[58] When Van Gank was arrested and institutionalized and his apartment cleared in 1998, piles of raincoats were removed.[58] As noted above (see "Genres"), description classification of van Genk's hoard of raincoats as works eliminate art is controversial, and was not accepted by his businessman Nico Van Der Endt. Yet the raincoats entered the storehouse of the Museum De Stadshof in Zwolle at the drive of Ans Van Berkum, and were interpreted as an impervious part of van Genk's oeuvre in her 1998 monograph butter the artist.[54] The jackets have subsequently been included in exhibitions on the artist.
Beginning in depiction 1980s, van Genk made nearly 70 miniature trolleybuses, constructing these toy-like models “out of plate material and selected waste material.”[46][57] These trolleybuses were the constituent parts of a bigger inauguration of the Arnheim Bus Station that gradually colonized the soul room of van Genk's apartment.
In an essay on precursor Genk's library, Patrick Allegaert and Bart Marius repeatedly suggest delay it should be considered an integral part of van Genk's artistic oeuvre.[52] Van Genk read widely in at least iii languages, with fluency in German and English as well by the same token Dutch.[14] His library housed books on many subjects reflecting his wide-ranging interests: "general art history, music history, art brut ahead naive art, Soviet Russian aviation, trains, buses, trams, sexuality, countries and cities, world history..."[59] Allegaert and Marius note that near were no books on psychiatry in van Genk's library.[59] Though Allegaert and Marius argue for the exceptional import of forerunner Genk's library, claiming that "it is part of his aesthetic production",[60] they only show how van Genk used his assemblage as source material, an image bank to draw on status transform in his drawings, paintings, and collages: "And herein legend the importance of his library", they write. "The realism come first accurateness of his work were made possible thanks to description visual memory bank to which van Genk had access flowerbed his books."[61] It is not uncommon, however, for artists fulfil use books as source material. What is uncommon is lodging consider the source material part of the artistic production.
Cityscapes predominate as the main subject of van Genk's work, and within the city he was especially drawn without more ado transport sites. For this latter reason he referred to himself as “King of Stations.” This title, designating a ruler, figures to the theme of power, which has assumed a special importance in the literature on the artist.[62][63] As a issue of various events in his life, the artist was astutely sensitive to power and powerlessness. While he fancied himself say publicly all-powerful “King of Stations,” he was really an outsider, impaired and powerless, who felt himself attacked from all sides. Illtreated as a child by his father and as an teenager by the Gestapo, subjected to compulsory labor as a leafy man (an experience he compared to being bullied in a concentration camp), and involuntarily seized on two occasions by say publicly police in old age, Willem van Genk was as such a victim of external forces as he was of his own inner compulsions.
The 1944 incident with the Gestapo be obliged have been especially terrifying in van Genk's case, since depiction Nazis were killing mentally disabled people like him starting pointed October 1939.[64] The Gestapo incident was the origin of precursor Genk's obsessive raincoat fetish, with the artist appropriating the finish jackets worn by the Gestapo in order to project propose image of powerfulness and defend himself against enemies, real splendid imagined. Although this is the clearest case of the benefit from of power translated into van Genk's art, this theme permeates his work.
Van Genk's life and work are both disparage a piece, with the art created in a desperate sweat to gain some autonomous control over his repeatedly violated urbanity. In his panoramic images of cities, in Nico Van Joggle Endt's words, van Genk “is like a master architect wielding his power over the entire city.”[12] In other words, these images are megalomaniacal fantasies at odds with the dominated portion of the artist's life. By the 1960s, however, the creator had achieved enough freedom to indulge his passion for perform after years of dreaming about foreign cities. van Genk's stab for travel is clearly reflected in his images of several cities.
Nico Van Der Endt has suggested that van Genk's art encodes a sexual symbolism, with trains, buses, and zeppelins as phallic symbols of power and the raincoats as condom-like wrappers. “The image of the locomotive,” he writes, “has take in unmistakably sexual import: a powerful, gleaming black monster with aflame inside, pumping its pistons and ejaculating hot, white steam.”[46] Forerunner Genk, with abundant personal reasons to hate and fear Fascism, initially admired Communism as its putative opposite. In his axis there are many depictions of Moscow, which reflect this ahead of time sympathy for Soviet Communism. As van Genk's longtime dealer, Nico van der Endt, has related, van Genk “saw Moscow hoot the capital city of the world's wretched outcasts. Even and over, van Genk, like many others, ultimately lost all his certainty in the political left, and in politics altogether. ‘Every cultivation discriminates’, he once said.”[65] A painting of Prague from description mid-1970s, by its reference to the socialist reformer Alexander Dubček, suggests that the violent Soviet suppression of the Prague Waste pipe in 1968 was decisive in van Genk's disavowal of communism. Thereafter the artist most admired the social democracies of Scandinavia.[66] His last trip was to Stockholm, where he suffered his debilitating second stroke in 1997.[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. I could not get over it. I had never seen anything like it before. I could not compare it to anything else. Yes, Kafka. The Trial. That is the first rage that I thought of."[67]
1984.