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.”’ The approbation of the art world had not entailed the wider social acceptance of this troubled, difficult figure. The year after his involuntary commitment, he suffered a first stroke. That same year, 1997, the artist made his last drawing, thus closing his career as an artist. That year also saw the publication of the first monographic account of the artist's career, Dick Walda's book Koning der stations, along with the preparation of another monographic catalogue to accompany a retrospective exhibition, Ans Van Berkum's Willem van Genk: A Marked Man and his World. 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. But before this exhibition opened, van Genk suffered another stroke while travelling in Stockholm; this would be the 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 artist himself was committed to a nursing home. Months before the 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.” Trauma and mental illness Van Genk's life and work is of special interest to those fascinated by the relationship between mental illness and artistic creativity. Like other famous Outsider Artists such as Adolf Wölfli and Martín Ramírez, van Genk had from extreme mental distress. Ever since the early 1920s, when Hans Prinzhorn published his study on The Artistry of the Mentally Ill (which was quickly adopted as an inspiration by the Surrealists in Paris), the artwork of the mentally ill has been a topic of considerable interests to artists, scholars, and the public at large. Yet this history is as marred by invidious classifications as it is 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 as an artist. He owned Johannes H. Plokker's Art from