of various events in his life, the artist was acutely sensitive to power and powerlessness. While he fancied himself the all-powerful “King of Stations,” he was really an outsider, disabled and powerless, who felt himself attacked from all sides. Abused as a child by his father and as an adolescent by the Gestapo, subjected to compulsory labor as a young man (an experience he compared to being bullied in a concentration camp), and involuntarily seized on two occasions by the police in old age, Willem van Genk was as much a victim of external forces as he was of his own inner compulsions. The 1944 incident with the Gestapo must have been especially terrifying in van Genk's case, since the Nazis were killing mentally disabled people like him starting in October 1939. The Gestapo incident was the origin of van Genk's obsessive raincoat fetish, with the artist appropriating the long jackets worn by the Gestapo in order to project an image of powerfulness and defend himself against enemies, real and imagined. Although this is the clearest case of the abuse of power translated into van Genk's art, this theme permeates his work. Van Genk's life and work are both of a piece, with the art created in a desperate attempt to gain some autonomous control over his repeatedly violated life. In his panoramic images of cities, in Nico Van Der Endt's words, van Genk “is like a master architect wielding his power over the entire city.” In other words, these images are megalomaniacal fantasies at odds with the dominated circumstances of the artist's life. By the 1960s, however, the artist had achieved enough freedom to indulge his passion for travel after years of dreaming about foreign cities. van Genk's enthusiasm for travel is clearly reflected in his images of various cities. Nico Van Der Endt has suggested that van Genk's art encodes a sexual symbolism, with trains, buses, and zeppelins as phallic symbols of power and the raincoats as condom-like wrappers. “The image of the locomotive,” he writes, “has an unmistakably sexual import: a powerful, gleaming black monster with fire inside, pumping its pistons and ejaculating hot, white steam.” Van Genk, with abundant personal reasons to hate and fear Fascism, initially admired Communism as its putative opposite. In his art there are many depictions of Moscow, which reflect this early sympathy for Soviet Communism. As van Genk's longtime dealer, Nico