After the Avant-Gardes

54. Is it significant that in Nerdrum’s early paintings, the only gun to appear is in
    the hands of a representative of the state? It is certainly significant to Andreas Baader.


55. Vine says of Nerdrum that “his case against modernism, as both a social and an
    artistic phenomenon, is that it has betrayed our most fundamental experience” (“Mastery
    and Mystery: The Paintings of Odd Nerdrum” in Bullard, Drawings, 9). John Seed, in
    “Scrotum and Taboo: The Reactionary, Visionary Paintings of Odd Nerdrum”
    <www.artsiteguide.com/nerdrum/>, writes of Nerdrum’s paintings: “This world, which
    the painter claims is set in the future, seems to be a place where whatever Freud claimed,
    at the opening of the twentieth century, was repressed or hidden in Western culture, is
    reclaimed by Nerdrum as a vitalistic principle.... [Nerdrum’s] Nordic peoples... no
    longer need to keep their bodies, their desires, or their biological dispositions hidden.
    ... Civilization, Nerdrum seems to say, is a set of taboos which can fall away and reveal
    our authentic passions and spirituality” (2).


56. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 40.


57. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 82.


58. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 100.


59. Pettersson, Nerdrum, 100. Pettersson goes on to say of Nerdrum: “In this sense
    his entire archaic utopia was a counter-image, in which he reflected all that we are not,
    in order to show who we really are” (100).


60. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 82.


61. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 192.


62. On these interpretations, see Hansen, Nerdrum, 38; Vine, Nerdrum, 50; and
    Pettersson, Nerdrum, 76. Contradicting this view of his paintings, Nerdrum has stated
    flatly that his concern was “not with what things would look like after a possible nuclear
    disaster” (quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 76; see also 82). Characteristically, in the
    interview published in On Kitsch(15–16), he says: “I have always wondered why this is
    supposed to be about atom bombs and fear and horror or how lonely people are. To me,
    the deserted wasteland is beautiful.”


63. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 56.


64. On Nerdrum and postmodernism, see Hansen, Nerdrum, 32–35 and Kuspit,
    “Existentialism,” in Hansen, Nerdrum, vii–viii.


65. For the relations of modernism, postmodernism, and the end of history, see my
    essay “Waiting for Godotand the End of History: Postmodernism as a Democratic
    Aesthetic,” in Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds.,
    Democracy and the Arts, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, 172–192.


66. Quoted in Pettersson, Nerdrum, 76, 82.


67. On the influence of Spengler on Nerdrum, see Hansen, Nerdrum, 43–44, Vine,
    Nerdrum, 42, and Pettersson, Nerdrum, 30.


68. Both quotations are taken from Pettersson, Nerdrum, 76, 56. Jencks, Post-
    Modernism, 142, says of Nerdrum’s work that “it alludes as much to a Viking past as an
    Existentialist future.” Seed (“Scrotum and Taboo,” 5) aptly speaks of Nerdrum’s “Post-
    Modern Vikings.”


69. The situation in Nerdrum’s paintings may be even more radical than this. He
    says of Cloud(1985): “This is a man who has lost all words and has a wordless conver-
    sation with the cloud.... All that surrounds [him] is nameless” (quoted in Pettersson,
    Nerdrum, 82).


70. Vine speaks of Nerdrum’s “rejection of modernism, both as a style and as a pro-
    gressive creed” (“Mystery” in Drawings, 8).

Notes to Pages 31–36 199