Willem van Genk was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, celebrated as one of the leading masters of Outsider Art.
Background
Willem van Genk was born on April 2, 1927 in Voorburg, Netherlands. Willem van Genk was the youngest of ten children. When he was five, his mother died, leaving Willem dependent on his abusive father and, especially, his nine sisters. His father, a member of the Dutch Resistance during the Second World War, helped to hide Jewish families. 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 and beat by the Gestapo. When van Genk’s father married for a third time after the war, he threw his troubled son out of the house.
Education
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.
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 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.
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. After losing his job he was forced to slave away at pointless tasks in something like a Victorian workhouse for the Dutch disabled.
In 1964, Beljon organized the first solo exhibition of van Genk’s work in Hilversum. But high prices meant few sales, and mixed publicity, some of which insulted the artist’s mental capacities, motivated van Genk’s withdrawal from this early public attention. 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 visite a number of cities in person, including Stockholm, Madrid, Rome, Moscow, Budapest, Frankfurt, and wall-divided Berlin. 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.
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, 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. Also in 1976 van Genk was included in two group shows devoted to “naive” art, in Amsterdam and Haarlem respectively.
In the 1980s van Genk achieved a new height of international recognition. In 1984 he was included in the "World Encyclopedia of Naïve Art", with almost a full-page reproduction of his painting "Madrid". The following year the Collection de l’Art Brut acquired three works on paper by van Genk, marking a commitment to represent his work in depth that culminated in a major exhibition of the museum’s collection in 1986, which established Van Genk’s international reputation.
With his reputation securely established, van Genk’s prices continued 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 did not satisfy van Genk’s wish to live a normal life.
In 1996 van Genk was involuntarily seized by the police from his Hague apartment and committed to a sanatorium. After three months, van Genk was released and allowed to return home. 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.
In 1997, Willem van Genk suffered a first stroke and made his last drawing, thus closing his career as an artist. He died of heart failure on May 12, 2005 in The Hague, Netherlands.
Religion
Willem van Genk was born into a Catholic family.
Views
Quotations:
"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."
"Nico Van Der Endt is the most solid comrade I’ve got, and that’s purely on a commercial basis."
Personality
Van Genk suffered from extreme mental distress. He suffered from symptoms related to autism and paranoid schizophrenia. The artwork of the mentally ill has been a topic of considerable interest of van Genk.
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. Then the experience with the Gestapo, compounded by abuse from his father, contributed to a lifelong paranoia, which in turn became a defining characteristic of his art.
Willem van Genk suffered from a variety of symptoms. He repeatedly confessed to hearing unreal voices - a classic symptom of schizophrenia. He also suffered from 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.
Nevertheless, from an early age, van Genk demonstrated great artistic skill and became a bibliophile with an extensive library of travel books. He also became a connoisseur of classical music, with a particular fondness for Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Moreover, on account of his passion for trains, buses, and train stations, he called himself the "King of Stations".
Besides, van Genk was also afflicted with sexual anxieties: in 1987 he complained that the proliferation of hair salons across The Hague was restricting his freedom of movement. The sight of long hair in frothy shampoo aroused sexual feelings that he had difficulty keeping under control. However, van Genk did not consider himself a homosexual.