logical depth, the self-portrait reminded me of Rembrandt (at the time,
I knew nothing of Nerdrum’s devotion to Rembrandt), and I found the
painting of the baby even more haunting, for reasons I could not articu-
late back then, but I would now speak of how Nerdrum’s sleeping infants
capture the vulnerability of human life in its most fragile form.
Unfortunately, in my first encounter I was unable to learn anything
about Nerdrum other than what was recorded on the labels of the Met’s
paintings—that he was Norwegian and was born in 1944.
My next encounter with Nerdrum came in 1996 when I was visiting
the New Orleans Museum of Art with a fellow English professor,
Michael Valdez Moses of Duke University. As I entered the central hall
of the New Orleans museum, I had a vision from more than a hundred
feet away of a large painting that could only be by that Norwegian artist
I had discovered at the Met. Although my Met experience had taught me
to recognize a Nerdrum when I saw one, it had not prepared me for the
impact of one of his genuine masterpieces. The painting in New Orleans
is his 1992 Five Persons around a Waterhole—a huge canvas—111 ×
140 inches—that exhibits all his trademark strengths—the enigmatic
subject matter captured in dark, mellow colors, the twilight mood, the
deep sense of desolation, the feeling of humanity at the limits of its
endurance. From the moment I saw that painting, I became a confirmed
believer in Nerdrum as an artist. Indeed, given the nature of his tech-
nique, and especially the careful and deep layering of paint, his works
must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. Reproductions simply
cannot do them justice, just as they cannot convey the full greatness of
Caravaggio’s or Rembrandt’s paintings.
And yet my intermittent efforts to track down more of Nerdrum’s
paintings in the flesh, so to speak, have proved disappointing. I have
gone to several museums that are listed as having Nerdrum paintings in
their collections: the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Frye Art
Museum (in Seattle), the Hirschorn Museum (in Washington, DC), the
Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (in New York),
and the Portland Art Museum (in Oregon). Unfortunately, none of these
museums had their Nerdrum paintings on display when I visited. I real-
ize that museums have limited wall space for display, and at any given
moment they must keep significant portions of their collections in stor-
age. Some of these museums may in fact be well-disposed toward
Nerdrum; after all, they own his paintings, and the Frye, which is explic-
itly devoted to the figurative tradition in painting, had a major Nerdrum
exhibition in 1997. Still, my nation-wide search for Nerdrums has led
me to suspect that museum curators are reluctant to display his works
The Importance of Being Odd 5