works is usually enough to place him in the modern world. Early in his
career, his works reflected contemporary political concerns; for exam-
ple, he painted German terrorists and Vietnamese boat people. And in
the major phase of his career, commentators have seen him creating
some kind of post-apocalyptic universe, with his dark palette underwrit-
ing a dark vision of the end of civilization as we know it. In terms of his
painterly technique, Nerdrum may seem like a reactionary, but there is
something disturbingly futuristic about the way he pictures the world.
Nerdrum’s career thus presents a challenge to the modernist estab-
lishment that still dominates the international art scene. He refuses to
paint like a modernist, but thematically he seems to be responding to a
crisis in the modern world; indeed he seems to be coming to grips with
the spiritual state of modernity in a way far more profound than that pur-
sued by most painters who style themselves ‘modernist’. Thus few con-
temporary painters have managed to enrage the modernist establishment
as much as Nerdrum has. The artists, critics, curators, dealers, and pro-
fessors who comprise the modernist establishment sense that if Nerdrum
is right, then they must be wrong, and he has been greeted by derision
and rejection from modernists at every stage of his career. Nerdrum has
in fact managed to shock a modernist establishment that generally prides
itself on its unflappability. They will accept almost anything on can-
vas—a scribble, a scrawl, even a blank—but evidently it upsets them to
contemplate a recognizably human form well rendered in all its fleshi-
ness by a living painter. That is the paradox of Nerdrum’s place in the art
world today. For all its claims to being avant-garde, modernist art has
long since lost its ability to surprise; nothing has become more pre-
dictable than the decades-old strategies of modern art to try to do some-
thing new and daring. But by returning to the Old Masters, Nerdrum has
broken with modernist convention and come up with a form of painting
all his own. With apologies to Robert Hughes, one might credit Nerdrum
with having invented a new artistic effect, ‘The Shock of the Old’.
My own encounter with Nerdrum is representative. I had never heard
of him when in the late 1980s I noticed two small paintings by him in
the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, one a self-portrait and one a painting of a baby wrapped in
swaddling clothes (two typical Nerdrum subjects as I was later to learn).
I was immediately drawn to these paintings; in the midst of a good deal
of standard modernist art, they caught my eye. It was the Old Master
technique that first impressed me. I could not believe that any living
artist was painting with such richness of detail and warmth of color. But
I also was struck by the subject matter of these paintings. In its psycho-4 Paul A. Cantor