Modernism is/was hardly one thing, which makes it difficult to talk
of singular orthodoxies and high-water marks--its various agendas
weren't devised as linear schema for easy teaching. But certainly the
pre-WWI Demoiselles and analytic cubism ate a lot of beach sand. You
seem to be reducing the field, in literature, to Pound and his cohort
and in painting to the New York School. Has anyone thought that
restrictively since these groups ceased to be embattled citadels?
But the problem of Nerdrum, as opposed to a whole range of other
well-appreciated realist painters (nobody is universally
appreciated), some of whom use the smooth brush-stroke technique of
most Renaissance painting (which I'm guessing is what you mean by
Nerdrum's pre-modernism), is that he's appallingly bad.
Mark
At 03:21 PM 11/14/2008, you wrote:
>I should clarify why I brought up the subject of Odd Nerdrum in the
>first place.
>
>I apologize ahead of time for this art history 101 quickie survey,
>which is probably familiar to everyone, but I'm trying to provide
>the basic context for Nerdrum's appearance, and don't know how else to do it.
>
>The high-water mark of literary Modernism was shortly after WWI, but
>in the visual arts it was shortly after WWII. Modernism in both
>instances began by a process of stripping away what was viewed as
>extraneous. In literature this process may have been fairly fluid
>and open-ended, depending on which school you are considering, but
>in painting, after WWII, the situation was much more
>restrictive. The range of possibilities began contracting with a
>vengeance and -- far more than in literature -- this process was
>conducted by a mere handful of critics, whose authority was
>virtually total. Painting became ever more and more reductive, ever
>closer to absolute minimalism, with the result that ever fewer
>artists were found to merit serious critical consideration. One
>response to this situation of increasing suffocation was Pop Art in
>the 60s, which basically thumbed its nose at the whole notion of
>serious art, and effectively broke the hammerlock of the critics and
>opened the f!
> lood gates.
>
>Just all this was happening, Nerdrum was commencing his own one-man
>revolution against minimalism and pop-art both, and it involved a
>rejection of virtually the entire Modernist enterprise in European
>art -- not just the previous generation, but the whole previous
>century. (There are now quite a number of exceptional artists
>working in pre-Modernist modes but, at the time, in the 60s, there
>was only Nerdrum). He was a student in a prestigious painting
>academy (I forgot which one), and because he refused to change his
>direction, he was thrown out. Later he became the student of, of
>all people, Joseph Beuys, who considered Nerdrum the most radical
>student he had ever encountered.
>
>Once it was known that Beuys took him seriously, the critics had to
>deal with him. As one of them put it (I'm paraphrasing from
>memory), Nerdrum embodied the whole post-Modernist dilemma. The
>critics didn't know how to admit Nerdrum to the pantheon of
>20th-century European art without cracking the Edifice.
>
>And I'm going to stop there. Personally I see meaningful parallels
>between painting and poetry in regards to Nerdrum's situation and
>questions of post-Modernism generally, but that's a larger subject
>than I'm qualified to tackle. What I can do, though, if anyone
>wishes to take a closer look at Nerdrum's effect on European
>painting, is provide the titles & authors of the first significant
>critical responses to Nerdrum.
>
>bj
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