the Mentally Disturbed: The Shattered Vision of Schizophrenics in no fewer than three languages. In his rather polemical study Plokker denies the ability of the mentally ill to make real art, which Plokker argues presupposes an “integrated personality.” The severity of this judgment, which takes refuge in incredibly neat distinctions between the sick and healthy, goaded van Genk on, worsening his persecution complex yet motivating him to disprove his enemies by creating his art. Willem van Genk had symptoms related to autism and paranoid schizophrenia. 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. Van Genk's fear of authority was arguably at least partly justified by traumas inflicted upon him: childhood abuse by his father and the Gestapo, involuntary servitude in a workhouse for the mentally disabled as a young adult, then ultimately his two arrests and involuntary commitments to psychiatric care as an old man. But if he had good reason to feel himself persecuted by powerful figures and bureaucracies, the consequence was undeniably a maladjusted, antisocial paranoia, such that, to cite the most striking example, his apartment was discovered carpeted by a layer of dog excrement. The artist had a variety of symptoms. He repeatedly confessed to hearing unreal voices—a classic symptom of schizophrenia. He was quite lonely, once telling his dealer Nico Van Der Endt, whom he addressed in the third person, "Nico Van Der Endt is the most solid comrade I've got, and that's purely on a commercial basis." He also had 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. Sexuality The artist also had 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 arouse(d) sexual feelings that he ha(d) difficulty keeping under control…” The following year in 1988 van Genk made a painting called The Hairdresser's Salon, a composite image divided by a grid into 32 equally sized squares, with macabre imagery suggesting, in conjunction with his revealing