Here you can see not only his moving portrait of Dr Felix Rey who saved his life after his horrific act of self-harm but the petition signed by many of his neighbours in Arles to have this strange, scary, foreign artist locked up.
A strange tableau from an unknown artist's private album, for instance, shows the severed head of a long-haired woman, a pair of legs, and the woman's apparent butcher, a man in a checked suit carrying a scythe and standing next to his sidekick, who wears a loincloth.
To read all of the stories and follow the arc of Mr. Purdy's career is to be reminded of how idiosyncratic, unpredictable and deeply strange an artist he was.
Still, PMD may never become anything bigger than a strange outsider artist who loves making dirty, exquisite drawings.
Everybody was expecting a strange beatnik artist from Hamburg, but Kirchherr turned up at the Sutcliffe's house at 37 Aigburth Drive, Liverpool, bearing a single long-stemmed orchid in her hand as a present, and dressed in a round-necked cashmere sweater and tailored skirt.
It's a strange chemistry — artists alone, together.
It seems strange that artists should need permission to copy works of art in a museum these days, when the purpose of establishing a collection of historical paintings in American museums, and elsewhere in the new world, was so that artists would have original paintings to study.
It's strange for artists like myself, and there are a lot of us around, who have done adventurous things on our own steam, taken works to remote places and not known there would be an audience and not worried about it.
