I was captured by art at an early age, and painted Poliakoff-like abstractions
before I turned nine. A reason for this was probably my stepfather. He was
a cultivated man who collected modern art. Often he took me on skiing
trips.... Once, when we reached a height, we stopped and looked at the
scenery. The valley in front of us lay bathing in the light from a magnificent
sunset. For a moment we were enthralled by the sight. Then he said: “It is
beautiful, but remember never to paint anything like this if you become an
artist, then you will not be accepted at the Autumn Exhibition.”^5This anecdote of little Odd being browbeaten into becoming a modernist
by a wicked stepfather is a marvelous inversion of the foundation myth
of modern art—the young Picasso rebelling against his father, who kept
telling him that he must paint in a traditional style if he wanted to be a
commercial success. Here, more than half a century later, the situation
is reversed. The young Nerdrum is forbidden by his stepfather to paint a
beautiful sunset, lest he ruin his artistic career, and he is coerced into
painting in the abstract mode. Nerdrum’s amusing anecdote is a serious
measure of how completely the modernist credo had come to dominate
the world of art by the middle of the twentieth century.
Thus to be a rebel, Nerdrum had to revolt against modernism and he
quickly began to develop doubts about the artistic principles being
forced upon him. In 1962, he entered the National Academy of Art in
Oslo, but in such a way that to him the whole process seemed tainted.
As one of his supporters explains: “The application had included three
paintings. Two of them were reasonably finished, while the third one had
been hurriedly thrown together to meet the deadline. The fact that this
was the one that the committee found so promising as to admit him into
the nation’s leading art school, made him question the criteria applied to
modern art. This was too easy; it offered too little resistance.”^6 Already
in his early teens, the audacious Nerdrum began to take advantage of his
stepfather’s executive position in the Scandinavian Airlines System to
travel all over Europe and eventually even to New York to broaden his
knowledge of art. The result was two-fold—he learned to appreciate Old
Masters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and he grew increasingly
disillusioned with the work of modernists such as Robert Rauschenberg.
As Nerdrum himself reports: “Modernism felt old and sad. I had seen so
much of it that I was fed up.”^7
With such an attitude, it was not long before Nerdrum began to run
afoul of the Norwegian art authorities. In 1964 he took part in an exhi-
bition in Oslo, for the first time unveiling to the public what one
reviewer called his “old-masterly gravy.”^8 Nerdrum immediately pro-
voked the hostility of the Norwegian art press; a critic named Ole Henrik
The Importance of Being Odd 9