After the Avant-Gardes

(Bozica Vekic) #1

two professorships in figurative technique established. As Pettersson
himself describes the results: “All hell broke loose. Staff and students
alike protested vociferously against the idea, internally as well as in the
media. Being a natural candidate for such a position, Nerdrum was
drawn into the fray.... Following a year of turmoil the minister of edu-
cation, Gudmund Hernes, was able to get both the professorships and
the necessary funding to carry out the idea. Hell broke loose again.”
With his international reputation as a figurative painter, Nerdrum was
clearly in line for one of the new professorships, and was indeed judged
“in a class of his own” by the committee charged with evaluating his cre-
dentials. But as Pettersson reports, “the resistance at the Academy, as
well as in parts of Norwegian society, now escalated to hysteria.”^12
Even foreigners became involved in the dispute. The Norwegian min-
ister of education had used the occasion of a speech at the Academy to
defend the idea of teaching figurative technique at a public art institution.
The American artist Joseph Kosuth, who was in Oslo at the time, pub-
lished a piece in which “he argued against the minister and for barring
this type of art from an academy, because it was ‘populist’ and not in line
with the art of our own century.”^13 Remember that what we are talking
about here used to be a standard part of artistic instruction—learning how
to draw the human figure. And yet a Norwegian government official
came under fire for advocating such a curricular reform. By the end of
1995, Nerdrum actually applied for the new teaching position, but the
opposition to him was so strong that on June 20th, 1996, just one day
before he would have been appointed, he chose to withdraw his name
from consideration. To give an idea of the violence of the opposition to
Nerdrum, Pettersson describes how he was treated in the press:
“Dagbladet, the tabloid that is Norway’s third largest newspaper, printed
an editorial that must be exceptional even in Norwegian cultural history.


... It concluded: ‘Let it be said: Norwegian art ought to find room for
many forms of expression, also Odd Nerdrum’s. But we do not believe
that he represents the future of Norwegian art, either at the Academy or
anywhere else.’”^14 Pettersson is obviously biased in favor of Nerdrum and
he was an interested party in these events; one must therefore allow for
the possibility that he may be narrating this story in a way that favors
Nerdrum. But making all the necessary qualifications, one cannot help
concluding that Nerdrum was done an injustice in this matter.
Coming as it did right at the end of the twentieth century, the
Norwegian Academy affair provides a neat counterweight to the various
modernist scandals at the beginning. In the early 1900s, Picasso began
to shock the world by radically departing from traditional ways of rep-


The Importance of Being Odd 11
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