even when they own them. My colleague Moses, who became as much
of a Nerdrum fan as I am during our New Orleans visit, reports that
when he was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, he
found a postcard of a major Nerdrum painting, The Sleeping Twins
(1987), in the museum store. The painting was not, however, on display,
and he had to talk a curator into letting him see it in the basement vault.
Moses tracked down one more American museum that displayed a major
Nerdrum painting—the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has
on loan from one of the galleries that represents Nerdrum one of his
best-known paintings, The Water Protectors(1985–1993), and I made a
special trip to see that. In short, Nerdrum’s works can be seen in the
United States—especially as it turns out at galleries in New York and
Los Angeles—but it does take some effort.
I tell the story of my personal encounter with Nerdrum’s work
because it reveals something about the current state of the art world. I
had to learn about Nerdrum entirely on my own. Although I am reason-
ably aware of art news, and go to museums more frequently than most
people, nobody alerted me to the emergence of a major talent from
Norway. Fortunately, and to its credit, the Met did have two of his paint-
ings on display rather early in his career, but they were not prominently
displayed—no stickers proclaiming ‘Director’s Choice’ or announcing
that Nerdrum was a stop on the audio tour. From my experience in
search of Nerdrums, I feel compelled to conclude that the art establish-
ment would be happy if Nerdrum would just go quietly away and take
his figurative paintings with him. Seeing Nerdrum’s works side by side
with the supposed masterpieces of modernism might lead museum vis-
itors to make invidious comparisons and ask all sorts of questions that
might embarrass the art establishment.
With all my difficulties in just seeing Nerdrum’s paintings, I do not
wish to give the impression that he remains unknown to the art public.
Despite all the efforts of the modernist establishment to keep Nerdrum
in obscurity, he has built up a substantial reputation over the years and it
shows signs of growing. I would like to be able to say that this is a trib-
ute to the sheer power of Nerdrum’s art, and to some extent I believe it
is. But I have to admit that some of Nerdrum’s success must be attrib-
uted to a genius for self-promotion that reminds me of nothing so much
as the early modernists. Indeed, Nerdrum seems to have learned from his
opponents—a lesson in the value of casting himself in the role of the
rebel against the artistic establishment. Now that modernism has lost its
edge and become the artistic establishment itself, Nerdrum knows that
the way to stand out from the crowd is to position himself against mod-6 Paul A. Cantor