Willem van Genk

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Willem van Genk (born April 2, 1927 in Voorburg , Netherlands ; † May 12, 2005 in The Hague ) was a schizophrenic and autistic Dutch painter and graphic artist. Because of his preference for trains, buses and stations, he also called himself the king of stations . He is considered the most important Dutch artist of Outsider Art .

Life

youth

Wilhelm van Genk was born in Voorburg in the Netherlands in 1927 . He didn't come with us at school and preferred to draw all day. When he was five years old, his mother died, and he was left with nine older sisters and the father, who was very disappointed in his son. In 1937 he went to a boarding school for boys who were difficult to educate, but here he also learned very little.

During the Second World War, van Genk was 17 years old, the Gestapo raided his parents' house in search of his father, who was a member of the Dutch resistance movement. Van Genk was ill-treated during interrogation. The Gestapo men in their long leather coats frightened him, but at the same time fascinated him. This traumatic experience shaped his obsession with power and powerlessness throughout his life; this is also evident in his art.

When his father remarried after World War II, he threw his feral son out of the house. Van Genk moved to live with his sister in The Hague and after her death remained alone in this apartment for almost the rest of his life.

Adulthood

Willem van Genk tried his luck as a draftsman in an advertising agency. Although he did a good quality job, he was fired because he did not feel bound by assignments and deadlines, and he went away for hours during work hours to watch trains. After his release, he was forced to work in a workshop for the disabled, which was a humiliating experience that heightened his inferiority complexes and obsession with power. It was during this time that he received help with his mental health problems for the first time, but afterwards he often suffered from paranoid attacks and heard voices.

In 1958 he enrolled at the Royal Academy in The Hague . The director J. Beljon immediately recognized the quality of his work, but also saw that the young artist was inaccessible for the lecturers' lessons. At the suggestion of Beljon, van Genk was allowed to go his own way at the academy, and as a result he remained self-taught.

In 1964 van Genk's first solo exhibition was organized in Hilversum . At that time he had already enjoyed nationwide fame for several years. In 1961, for example, a television program was dedicated to him, a fact that primarily frightened him. In those early days, van Genk was described as a brilliant, naive painter rather than an idiot genius. It is interesting in this context that van Genk referred to himself as a dutch moron painter . Frightened by this attention, Van Genk withdrew from the public in the early 1960s. Because he had since been declared unable to work, he could devote all of his time to his art.

Only in 1976 was there another exhibition of his work, and he was now represented by a gallery. Willem van Genk was no longer wrongly compared to the naive painters. Although he did not imitate academic art, he was anxious to gain recognition from the art world. It was also evident that his art stands for itself.

In 1996, Willem van Genk suffered individual heart attacks, which prevented him from painting. Two years later he was admitted to a nursing home and his apartment in The Hague was closed. Willem van Genk died on May 12, 2005 of complications from pneumonia.

plant

Style and technology

Willem van Genk has drawn a lot since he was a child. In his youth he gradually painted more complex pictures, imaginative city panoramas, filled with meandering streets and busy crowds, the airspace filled with large zeppelins and bombers. He was only to begin traveling to various European cities in the early 1960s. From then on he drew imposing buildings that he had seen on his travels, such as the Keleti pályaudvar (Ostbahnhof) train station in Budapest and the train station in East Berlin . These early works were made in pencil and black ink - from 1964 onwards, van Genk mostly switched to oil paint - provided with titles and advertising material, scraps of waste, scraps of paper from travel brochures and history books. The paintings, which van Genk himself called posters, often have a clear division. A strongly emphasized center, often a building or a portrait, with bands of drawings and paintings running around it.

In later works the cityscapes are depicted from close up, as if the artist had descended into the city from above, for the purpose of a bombardment of visual impressions such as teeming crowds, traffic flows and dozens of advertising signs. Gradually the paintings developed into a cacophony of images. In the course of time, van Genk's works became more and more lively and intricate in their composition, the strict composition was abandoned and the images were replaced by texts. The pictures often have an obsessive character, there is a tightly packed, overwhelming amount of pictures to be seen. This development in van Genk's work is related to the course of his schizophrenia . In the 1990s, he limited himself to editing copies of older works with different colored ballpoint pens.

Willem van Genk as an outsider

Willem van Genk's work is outsider art in the truest sense of the word. His work stands outside of official art and was not influenced by it. That his work shows kinship with other artists, e.g. B. Heinrich Vogeler (collage technique) and August Walla (subject) can be seen as a coincidence. He also worked out of his obsession and not based on planned concepts. His art was at the intersection of his fears and his needs. His work is not designed to communicate with the viewer or to trigger feelings in them.

subjects

The central theme in Willem van Genk's work is power . As a result of various events in his life, the artist was hurt by power and impotence. In his own experience he was on the one hand overpowering as the “king of the train stations”, on the other hand an ingrown, an outsider and powerless man who is harassed from all sides.

Willem van Genk suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was also autistic. He was admitted to a psychiatric facility several times in his life. But by means of his art he tried to cope with the unimaginable chaos in his head and to overcome his fears. In this way he tried to gain control over the processes that were taking place in the gruesome outside world, and thus shielded himself against alleged conspiracies and attacks from outside. His art thus served as a mechanism of repression and it is therefore not surprising that van Genk had great difficulty in distancing himself from what he was doing. Only sometimes did he sell a painting and then only to a museum.

Willem van Genk's work has great symbolic significance. Frequent symbols of power are huge buildings, train stations and trains, which he calls locomotives, trolleybuses, zeppelins and airplanes. Other motifs that recur in his work are classical music, hair salons and powerful men. Willem van Genk also often depicts ideologies and religions in his works in order to overcome the fear they cause him. His art is based on an all-encompassing philosophy determined by fear. Communism , fascism , Catholicism , capitalism , the international peace movement and the provoculture , in his eyes they are all enormous forms of power in a big, troubled world. All equally cunning and dangerous, who can only be stopped in a labor camp, from where they can no longer pursue him.

Work groups

Four groups of works can be distinguished in Willem van Genk's work:

  • about 100 drawings and paintings
  • his collection of raincoats
  • his installation Arnhem Station and his collection of self-made trolleybuses
  • the furnishing of his apartment (cleared after his death)

Drawings and paintings

Urban landscapes are often reproduced in Willem van Genk's two-dimensional work. The paintings are characterized by a great attention to detail. They are often collages in which a central image is surrounded by several smaller images. The relationship between the objects shown is often very associative. The result is a rich, overwhelming, and intense overall picture. He often uses texts in the collages. Headings and headlines are used as comments throughout the picture. As a result, it seems as if the artist has an almost omnipotent overview of the city and all of its economic, social and political processes that take place in it and are reproduced as aboveground and underground activities of urban transport.

Raincoats

Willem van Genk's fascination with long, leather coats is directly related to the traumatic experience of his youth when he was abused by the Gestapo. This event not only established his lifelong struggle with power and powerlessness, but also led to the artist starting to collect long raincoats. Hundreds of such jackets could be found in his apartment; they were not given away. Van Genk personally provided the coats with snaps to make them functional. An act that he himself described as artistic fornication . Similar to his two-dimensional work, the long jackets were seen as an opportunity to acquire power. When he walked down the street dressed in such a coat, which he often wore only once, he felt powerful and at the same time it had a strong erotic effect on him. That is why images of long raincoats also appear in his paintings.

Installation of the Arnhem bus station

When van Genk's apartment was dissolved, a large self-made installation was found. This was the Arnhem bus station . The buildings and countless trolleybuses are made of milk cartons, candy wrappers and toys, in turn provided with a large number of (advertising) texts and slogans.

Home furnishings

Willem van Genk's apartment in The Hague was crammed with books, raincoats, and large quantities of carefully arranged, hammered clothes. The walls were transformed into large collages similar to his paintings. His apartment served as a secure fortress in which he holed up, and thus had the same protective function as paintings and raincoats. Changing the apartment and giving away clothes were therefore also unthinkable. Willem van Genk's apartment was in the tradition of total works of art such as Bottle Village by Grandma Prisbey and Helen Martins OWL House . The apartment was cleared out in 1998 .

literature

  • Dick Walda: Koning of the stations . Uitgeverij de Schalm, Amsterdam 1997.
  • Ans van Berkum: Willem van Genk: a marked man and his world . Museum de Stadshof, Zwolle 1998.
  • Jan Keja: Ver van huis . TV documentary, IKON 2001 / VPRO 2005.
  • General Artist Lexicon , Volume 51. Munich: Saur, 2006, p. 330.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Genk, Willem van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch painter and graphic artist of the outsider art
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Voorburg
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 2005
Place of death The hague