etchings,” and finally a number of large ballpoint drawings that constitute the artist's late work. Through 1960, the images were relatively traditional, panoramic depictions of European metropolises, with an especial emphasis on transportation: trains and train stations, zeppelins, trolleybuses, etc. Later in the artist's career he adopted a modernist syntax of fragmentation, often cutting up pictures and recombining them in composite images distinguished by a jumpy, visual staccato. Several “painted boards or sheets of different sizes, put and held together with small nails and tape” were thus brought together to constitute a single composite work. While this montage technique of composition is by no means unique either to van Genk or artists struggling with debilitating mental illness (Willem de Kooning, for example, did something similar), in his case it is especially suggestive, as this fragmented syntax may be thought to parallel the symptoms of schizophrenia. The artist incorporated images from other visual media into his collages: advertising copy, waste materials, and cuts of paper from travel brochures and history books. His work has an obsessive, cacophonous character that parallels the overwhelming scale and abrupt juxtapositions of the modern city. Titles and headlines were used as a commentary within the composite image. Composing with the different elements of the modern metropolis, the artist assumed a position of mastery, as if exercising an omnipotent supervision over the city and all its economic, social, and political processes. Raincoats Willem van Genk's fascination with long raincoats may be traced directly to the traumatic experience of his youth, when he was mistreated by the Gestapo, the men of which are recorded to have worn long leather jackets on the occasion. Van Genk incessantly collected long jackets, mostly of cheap plastic, eventually filling his apartment with hundreds. Van Genk seems to have treated these raincoats as fetishes endowed with sexual and defensive power. It seems as though van Genk thought that the Gestapo's power to harm was an emanation of their costumes, and that he sought to protect himself from the dangers of the world by appropriating their outerwear. Raincoats also appear as images in his paintings. The collection of raincoats, eventually numbering in the hundreds, is the prime example of van Genk's hoarding fetish. The artist explained, "I once discarded a raincoat, and looking back, I regret that." When Van Gank was arrested and institutionalized and his apartment cleared in 1998, dozens of raincoats were