Admittedly I was painting with broad strokes, knowing there would be a 
chorus of justified objections.  I was simply attempting, in a few 
sentences, to place Nerdrum historically, in order to try to explain why he 
is widely viewed as an essential and pivotal figure in the transition from 
Modernism to post-Modernism in painting.

His revolt consisted in an absolute commitment to an "extinct" style.  He 
did it with no support -- he was part of no school.  He persisted in the 
face of years of hostile opposition and ridicule.  This is hardly an 
uncommon story in art, but in Nerdrum's case he stood against the current of 
his time not by looking ahead in choosing his technique, but by looking 
back.  His choice of technique constitutes a great part of his substance, 
his significance.

As to how good or bad he might be, it is of course first of all necessary to 
view his work in person -- preferably an entire show.

He may be a bad artist; it is more than likely that my own taste is 
uninformed and unsophisticated.  I believe his technique is astonishing, but 
I am easily astonsihed.  The point is, I am not making a case for his 
quality; I am only referring to his importance in the history of painting. 
The most accomplished artists are not always the most pivotal, or 
vice-versa.

Personally, my first encounter with Nerdrum's paintings was revelationary. 
But I don't claim personal revelation as evidence of anything.

To draw in someone's else's considered assessment -- in contrast to a recent 
assessment on this list that "there is nothing there" --  here is the 
closing paragraph of Donald Kuspit's "Odd Nerdrum: Perverse Humanist". 
Kuspit is by no means always laudatory of Nerdrum.

"Nerdrum's three paintings (Self-Portrait in Golden Gown; Pissing Woman, Old 
Man with a Dead Maiden) are existential allegories.  They epitomize his art, 
which is a peculiarly medieval psychomachia -- even a contemporary version 
of miracle play -- that deals with the conflict between the life-instincts 
and the death-instincts, subtly evident in the body, and taking their toll 
on it.  The very grain of Nerdrum's pictures is fraught with the gnostic 
battle between biophilia and necrophilia, as his tenebrism indicates.  He 
has in fact revitalized, even quintessentialized, what has become an Old 
Master cliche -- the subtle oscillation and tension between light and dark 
that structures emotional life -- showing that nothing in art is obsolete, 
so long as it cn still be put to human use.  Showing that Old Master methods 
are still fresh and meaningful is Nerdrum's way of indicating that however 
much human beings are subject to the terror of annihilation anxiety, whether 
for individual or social reasons, the consummate artistry with which their 
suffering can be represented triumphs over it.  Nerdrum's human beings 
endure, however injured by the inhumanity of the world and their own 
inadequacy, just as his art will endure, however much it perversely drops us 
into the abyss of existence."









----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 4:13 PM
Subject: Re: the point of nerdrum


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