After the Avant-Gardes

resenting the human figure, and he at first encountered fierce opposition from the art establishment. By the late 1990s, Nerdrum ...

in their country. The small size of the Norwegian cultural community no doubt goes a long way toward explaining why the attempt ...

artist had to please someone, either a patron from the court or the church, or the paying customers who constitute the commercia ...

properly between good and bad art, but at least these systems, in forcing artists to please somebody, imposed a kind of discipli ...

in a world of public funding, art must be “politically correct,” however that term may be defined in a given state at a given ti ...

as the unholy alliance between modern art and the modern state—the abstract message of the artwork has become more important tha ...

“as a separate philosophical discipline where art and beauty are consid- ered an independent category with its own rules and val ...

Against the aesthetic—and ascetic—purity of Kantian art, Nerdrum argues for the validity and vitality of commercial art.^20 In h ...

and stifles development. Freeing the artist from any need to please the public makes his art more intellectual and less sensual, ...

ket, they would only be damning themselves. When it comes to finan- cial support, modernists have truly enjoyed the best of all ...

of student protest movements that were sweeping Europe at the time,^27 and one might be tempted to impute left-wing sympathies t ...

personality while soliciting the viewer’s identification and compassion. The subject is therefore an illumination of what we can ...

turned their backs on her and she has fallen into the hands of two nurses who are about to swaddle her in a cloak. Vine describe ...

paintings, Nerdrum is drawn to images of mutilation and dismember- ment—see, for example, Amputation(1972)—as if to suggest that ...

aesthetic and moral perceptions should be improved, has been tried out by both the Communists and the Nazis, as well as the mode ...

When modernism in art gradually gained acceptance and hegemony during the last century, it was recognised that this occurred wit ...

What distinguishes Nerdrum is thus the fact that as an artist he is anti-state, not just in the practical sense that he has as l ...

Nerdrum evokes in these paintings, he takes us back to the world of the Norse sagas, where tribe is pitted against tribe in endl ...

might be his salvation (Boy with Twig[1992]).^51 The situation with ani- mal life is no better. Unlike the stock characters of p ...

alone). Even one of the shaman figures Nerdrum paints has a rifle rest- ing on his lap (Revier[1985–98]). There apparently is no ...