In the past, when it came to Outsider Art, “the story of the artist had the same importance as the product,” says Feilacher, an intense man whose face might have come out of a Dürer engraving and who’s wearing brown cords and a navy sweater when I meet with him at Gugging on an overcast late-winter morning. After serving me espresso and cookies, Feilacher explains his perspective: “Psychiatrists like stories. But I’m interested in the genius of these people and not primarily in their illnesses. These people have the same rights as any talented artist, including the right to make money with it.” Feilacher, who has sole discretion over choosing the artists who live in the house, has actively worked toward creating a competitive market among collectors for the art of Gugging residents past and present. He has devised an arrangement that evenly splits the proceeds from sales between the center and the artists, who use their earnings for cigarettes, sweets, and annual vacations. He proudly points out that the work of Hauser, whom he considers one of “the best artists of the 20th century,” has exponentially appreciated in value in two decades.

Other than the house’s staff of five, who see to it that the artists get their medication three times a day (an outside psychiatrist comes every other week to write prescriptions), have freshly washed underwear, brush their teeth, and take showers, Katschnig is the most personally involved with the artists. Several of them, including Schützenhöfer, Heinrich Reisenbauer, and Johann Korec, choose to work at the large wooden table in her spacious office rather than in the museum’s studio or in the house itself. When Katschnig first came to Gugging in 1997, she set about matting and reframing 150 works by Oswald Tschirtner, a resident who died last May. Tschirtner’s elongated and wittily laconic drawings of cephalopodic figures — all head and feet — still hang casually about the place, with one unusually large mural greeting visitors to the gallery.

Katschnig is clearly attached to the artists. She has a light, skilled touch, unostentatiously intimate and unintrusively solicitous. Our first stop in the house is the bedroom of Garber, the unofficial consigliere, who possesses a megalomaniacal confidence and faith in his own talent that the others lack. (Later, as we’re leaving, he presents me with a nail-brush marked with dots, his initials, and the initials of the house, all with a collector’s assurance of the gift’s inherent market value.) There are stuffed animals on his bed, and although he shares the room with two other artists — Reisenbauer and Korec — he has filled it to the brim with hundreds of his own paintings and drawings. In his artistic zeal, he also paints objects and the abandoned stove in the basement workspace. Garber works in different sizes and two styles: One features brightly colored acrylic paint and speckles of dots, while the other involves India ink and a feather pen on paper. With meticulous, tiny images of flowers, animals, fronds, trucks, and helicopters, he covers the paper from edge to edge “in an effort to deny empty space,” as Colin Rhodes, who has written and lectured widely on modern and contemporary art, observes in his book Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. At least four of the Gugging artists are obsessed with helicopters, as if responding to their own confinement and isolation with a graphic symbol of freedom and flight. In a style reminiscent of his drawings, Garber has filled one of the walls in his room with hundreds of hanging trinkets — troll dolls, key chains — of the sort you might find in a souvenir shop.

After we visit Garber, Katschnig takes me to Karl Vondal’s room. The newest addition to the house, Vondal has lived here for only six years, in contrast to the decades of the other residents. A stringed guitar made of matchsticks and wool, representative of the work he did when he first arrived but no longer does, decorates the wall over his bed. Katschnig looks on with genuine interest as he proudly shows us his latest work: a giant piece of oak tag beginning to resemble one of his extraordinary fictional maps. To create these works, he draws figures with a gray pencil, then fills them in with colored pencils, which he blurs with his fingers until the pigment is almost transparent. Like Garber, Vondal extends his drawings to cover the entire surface of the paper. His cosmology includes busty mermaids, who sit on swings or ride horses, palm trees, and airplanes, all interspersed with sections of script and enlarged penises. He also depicts sexual intercourse in its many modes; he titled one of his works The Sex Mania. Vondal used to work on small pieces of lined paper that he rolled up and carried in his pocket, later gluing them together on one canvas. More recently he has begun working with a large backdrop. Vondal, who is 54, tells Katschnig that he finds me “schön” (pretty) and wants to know my age and whether I can still get pregnant. He then pats his maroon bedspread for me to sit down next to him on the bed and gleefully points out a tower of a penis on his work in progress, as if to say, “Behold priapic man!” Katschnig translates my response, which is to admire the organ’s majesty while expressing doubt as to its size. Later, as we leave the house, Vondal, sitting at a table in the hall smoking and paging through a tabloid, stops us to share a photo of a voluptuous female, whose physical virtues he rapturously dilates upon like an adolescent boy encountering his first pinup.