Moe wrote in Aftenposten (June 11th, 1964): “It simply won’t do to
ignore a whole generation of progress towards the limits of abstraction,
to deny surrealism, cubism, Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Francis Bacon.... It takes courage, however, to face up to one’s own time, more
courage than is needed to beat the baby drum of reactionism.”^9 One
might quarrel with an art critic who chooses to measure a twenty-year-
old art student against the likes of Picasso, but the real question is
whether Nerdrum was in fact exhibiting more courage by his willingness
to challenge what had become in his day the rigid orthodoxy of mod-
ernism. Nerdrum soon found that he could not get along with his pro-
fessors in Oslo and eventually was “chased out of the Academy like a
mangy dog,” as he put it.^10 Nerdrum never gave up trying to exhibit his
works in his native country, but his efforts continued to be met with
opposition. In 1998, he recalled with some bitterness the humiliation he
had suffered some twenty years earlier:
I had been allowed to hang two of my larger paintings—The Arrestand The
Murder of Andreas Baader—in the new students’ house at the University of
Oslo.... They were beautifully hung in a staircase, which almost looked
like a Caravaggio chapel. But it did not take long before someone disliked
the show. A committee at The Academy of Art had decided that the paint-
ings in this particular staircase had to come down. They surprised me with
a letter saying that all “decorations” had to be removed within a fortnight.
(OK, 9–10)We should bear in mind that we are dealing here with a man who went
on after the 1970s to become undoubtedly the most famous Norwegian
painter since Edvard Munch.^11 Norway has not had that many interna-
tionally famous artists to boast of—in addition to Munch, there are
Edvard Grieg in music, and Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun in literature
(to be generous, one might include Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Sigrid
Undset). One might truly wonder why the country has been unwilling in
Nerdrum’s case to celebrate the achievement of one of its few interna-
tionally recognized artists. Although Nerdrum has by now attracted
champions among Norwegians, he still encounters fierce opposition in
his homeland. As recently as the 1990s, he became embroiled in a bitter
battle with the Norwegian art establishment. Nerdrum had long been
publicly complaining that the Norwegian National Academy of Art did
not offer classes in figurative painting, and in 1988 a group of his pri-
vate students joined in the agitation, writing an open letter to the gov-
ernment on the issue. By 1994, a Nerdrum supporter, Jan Åke
Pettersson, had become head of the Academy in Oslo, and he tried to get10 Paul A. Cantor