Willem van Genk (2 April 1927 – 12 May 2005) was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, celebrated as one of the leading masters of outsider art. Throughout his life he lived with severe mental distress, experiencing symptoms related to autism and schizophrenia.See Ans Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", in Patrick Allegaert, Annime Calliau, Ans van Berkum and Bart Amrius, Willem van Genk: Building A World of His Own, Tielt: Lanoo, 2010, pp. 46, 63–64 and the endnote on p. 100. On account of his passion for trains, buses, and train stations, he called himself the "King of Stations".Notably, this moniker is the title of the first monograph published on the artist, by his most trusted associate, Dick Walda. (For the evidence that Walda was van Genk's most trusted associate, see Nico Van Der Endt, Willem van Genk: Chronicle of a Collaboration, Amsterdam: Uitgave, 2014, p. 110. This book is available only in Dutch.)
Van Genk's panoramic cityscapes and fragmented collages express his feelings about modern authority, feelings which were shaped by an abusive father who, in addition to administering his own beatings, left him exposed to a traumatic experience at the hands of the Gestapo during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.Ans Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1998, p. 108.
Van Genk's art has been widely exhibited in Europe, where it is also in many museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, the Lille Metropole Musee d'Art Modern, d'Art Contemporain et d'Art Brut (LaM), the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art in Zagreb, the Zander Collection in Cologne, and the Museum of Everything in London.Patrick Allegaert, Annime Calliau, Ans van Berkum and Bart Amrius, Willem van Genk: Building A World of His Own, Tielt: Lanoo, 2010, pp. 4 and 34. Raw Vision, the leading magazine covering Art Brut, ranks van Genk among the "masters of outsider art".Allegaert et al., p. 4. At the beginning of 2005, the year of the artist's death, van Genk's Keleti Station, now in the collection of the Museum of Everything in London, sold for a hundred thousand dollars at New York's Outsider Art Fair, thus setting the record for the most expensive work ever sold by a living outsider artist.Nico Van Der Endt, Willem van Genk: Chronicle of a Collaboration, Amsterdam: Uitgave, 2014, p. 124. On that occasion, Roberta Smith, the chief art critic of The New York Times, praised the piece "as the leading candidate for best in show". At least one other critic has identified van Genk as the most important Dutch outsider artist.Ans Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", in Allegaert et al., Willem Van Genk: Building A World of His Own. Tielt: Lanoo, 2010, p. 37.
Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States, was presented from 10 September through 30 November 2014, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.Rousseau, Valérie; Allegaert, Patrick; and Lamot, Yoon Hee, Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, exhibition brochure. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014, p. 4
Life
Early years Willem van Genk was born in 1927 in Voorburg, Netherlands. When he was five, his mother died, leaving the young boy dependent on his abusive father and, especially, his nine sisters. 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. He was especially weak in mathematics, which outraged his father, who forced Willem to add and subtract the number of blows as he beat him.Nico Van Der Endt, Willem van Genk: Chronicle of a Collaboration, Amsterdam: Uitgave, 2014, p. 16. Willem was expelled from primary school, and then failed at vocational school. He also began a sign-painting course, but did not finish it. These early failures and abuses fostered an inferiority complex, from which art was the only outlet.In a list of the artist's obsession, van Genk writes "Inferiority Complex" without elucidating comment. See Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", p. 64. In art van Genk was exceptionally skilled, and he would use his skill to assume the perspective of a godlike overseer of the modern metropolis.Van Der Endt, p. 20. During the Second World War, the Netherlands were occupied by Nazi Germany. Van Genk's father was a member of the Dutch resistance, and hid Jews in the family home. Their fate is not recorded in the literature on the artist.Ans Van Berkum writes that "There is no mention in her (i.e. van Genk's sister Tiny's) account of any betrayal of fugitives, although a couple of Jewish boys were indeed secretly lodging in the coal and oil merchant's on the ground floor beneath the Van Genk's." Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 108. This omission is inconclusive, however, and might instead reflect a fate Tiny considered too terrible to mention. In 1944 when Willem was seventeen years old, the Gestapo visited the family apartment in the Magnoliastraat in search of the father, who was not there. In his stead Willem was interrogated by the Gestapo, who beat the adolescent, subjecting him, in the words of his eldest sister, to "a few heavy clouts."Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 108. 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."The artist's sister, Tiny van den Heuvel, quoted in Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 108. 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 treated as a sort of fetish, a prophylactic protecting the paranoid artist against what he thought of as the ubiquitous threat of his enemies.
When van Genk's father married for a third time after the war, he threw his troubled son out of the house.Ans Van Berkum, Willem Van Gent: A Marked Man and His World, p. 108. 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.Ven Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 109.
Career Willem van Genk originally pursued his talent as a draftsman in an advertising agency. He delivered work of good quality, but he was nonetheless fired, because he could not maintain a regular working schedule and abide deadlines. He also would spend hours observing trains during work time.Ans Van Berkum in cooperation with Carolien Satink, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, Zwolle: Museum De Stadshof, 1998, p. 108. After losing his job he was forced into menial work in a workhouse for the disabled.Van Der Endt, p. 16. This compulsory labor was known as "labor for the inferior", a derogatory term which haunted the artist the rest of his life. Van Genk told his friend Dick Walda: "I have never gotten over it, I think. Being labelled as 'inferior'. The bosses there make sure you know about it. They're more like concentration camp bullies than bosses."Quoted in Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 108. The experience was degrading, and van Genk took it as justification for his paranoia. At this time he first received help for his mental problems, but thereafter he still often had paranoid episodes and heard unreal voices.Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", pp. 63 and 64. This source cites two instances when the artist confessed to hearing voices. In the year 1958 he registered with the Royal Academy in The Hague. The director Joop Beljon recognized immediately the quality of his work, but also that the young artist was beyond the reach of the faculty's lessons. At the director's suggestion van Genk was allowed to take his own path at the academy, and consequently he remained an autodidact.Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", p. 90. At this time van Genk was noticed for the first time, with the journalist R.E. Penning praising his work as "panoramas of Lilliput towns as seen by Gulliver."Van Berkum, Willem Van Genk: A Marked Man and His World, p. 109.
In 1964, Beljon organized the first solo exhibition of van Genk's work in Hilversum. The Dutch writer W.F. Hermans opened the show and commented that his works "are frighteningly beautiful, but they will remind many of something they would rather forget."Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", p. 96. But high prices meant few sales, and mixed publicity, some of which insulted the artist's mental capacities, partly motivated van Genk's withdrawal from this early public attention. Furthermore, he was his own harshest critic, unable to bear the sound of his recorded voice. A television interview to publicize the exhibition so horrified the artist that for decades he refused to be filmed, photographed, or taped.Van Der Endt, p. 32. Van Genk's inferiority complex was thus a major impediment to the 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 Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf; notably, the prestigious Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam's museum of modern art, bought van Genk's painting Metrostation Opera. With his successes in the mid-1960s, van Genk was finally able to indulge his passionate interest in cities by visiting them in person. 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. Now he visited many cities, including Stockholm, Madrid, Rome, Moscow, Budapest, Frankfurt, and wall-divided Berlin.Allegaert et al., p. 21. Landmark architecture from these cities, especially train stations, feature in many works by the artist.
In the 1970s van Genk's career as an artist continued with modest success. He was included at the Düsseldorf IKI art fair in 1974, but nothing of his sold. Initially represented by Pieter Brattinga,Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", pp. 90–92. The artist later entered into litigation against Brattinga over his failure to return or sell consigned works. by the 1970s van Genk was represented by the gallery De Ark. The gallery's last show in 1976 before being taken over by the Hamer Gallery, which continued to represent the artist, was devoted to van Genk's work.Van Berkum, "A Bird Above the City", pp. 92–93. Also in 1976 van Genk was included in two group shows devoted to "naïve" art, in Amsterdam and Haarlem respectively.Van Der Endt, p. 36. 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.Van Der Endt, p. 40.