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 art van Genk was exceptionally skilled, and he would use his skill to assume the perspective of a godlike overseer of the modern metropolis. 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. Maddeningly, their fate is not recorded in the literature on the artist. 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." 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." 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. After losing his job he was forced to slave away at pointless tasks in something like a Victorian workhouse for the Dutch disabled. 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." 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. In the year 1958 he registered with the Royal Academy in The Hague. The director Joop Beljon recognized