Genk was an outsider. Yet his status as an Outsider Artist was questioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on the occasion of its survey exhibition “Parallel Visions” in 1992, when the museum held van Genk's partial success in achieving official recognition against him. Van Genk, with his hoarding compulsion, hated to part with his work: one monograph claims that he felt parting with a painting was like having a limb amputated. Yet he also desired official recognition, so his dealer devised a strategy of dissemination whereby, on the rare occasion when the dealer was allowed to sell a work, it was invariably to a museum. According to LACMA this strategic dissemination of works to museums, in order to maintain a minimal livelihood for the artist and elevate his status, violated “a basic criterion: outsider art must not be created for the public.” If accepted, however, this exclusion would place van Genk outside any clear categorization as an artist. Furthermore, it was only the paintings and drawings which were made with the idea of public exhibition in mind: the trolleybuses and raincoat hoard were, on the contrary, private projects, qualifying as Outsider Art even in accordance with LACMA's exclusive definition. Work Genres Art historians have distinguished four categories within van Genk's work: approximately 100 drawings and paintings his installation “Bahnhof Arnheim” and his collection of self-made trolleybuses his collection of raincoats his library This scheme, including non-traditional art objects, is premised on the notion that the artist's life was itself an artwork, a notion current at the time through the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, the work of Joseph Beuys, the rise of performance art, etc. However, the artist's dealer Nico Van Der Endt disapproved of this classification, writing in his Chronicle: “I am not comfortable with the idea of exhibiting the raincoats, which are not art objects.” It is likewise unconventional to classify a library as a work of art, although it is common for art historians to consider an artist's books in order to reconstruct the artist's thought and possible source material. Paintings and drawings Willem van Genk made around 100 paintings, collages, and drawings, most of which feature cityscapes. These works are usually big (“between one and two metres wide”) and the product of extensive labor (“he tended to work on each one for a couple of years”). There are about 80 paintings/collages, “five monochrome