of student protest movements that were sweeping Europe at the time,^27
and one might be tempted to impute left-wing sympathies to Nerdrum
and perhaps even to view him as a child of the New Left. Several of the
paintings appear to participate in the fight for sexual liberation; one
called Liberation(1974)^28 portrays a woman on top in sexual intercourse
and thus seems to speak to the cause of women’s liberation; and one of
the paintings, Spring(1977), offers a frank depiction of homosexuality
and thus might be linked to the gay liberation movement. Probably the
most famous—and controversial—work from this phase of Nerdrum’s
career is The Murder of Andreas Baader(1977–78). This painting is a
good example of how Nerdrum invokes his Old Master models to make
a powerful statement about the contemporary world. By consciously pat-
terning his painting on Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St. Peter,
Nerdrum succeeds in casting the German terrorist Andreas Baader, a
member of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang, as a martyr to the
tyranny of the modern state. Nerdrum depicts as a murder what official
German government accounts represented as a prison suicide, and thus
openly challenges the credibility of state authority.^29
Because the Baader-Meinhof Gang was well to the left of the politi-
cal spectrum, Nerdrum’s sympathetic portrayal of one of their leaders
might suggest that he was an advocate of left-wing causes and perhaps
even communist in his beliefs. But shortly after painting The Murder of
Andreas Baader, Nerdrum produced one of his largest and most visually
spectacular canvases, Refugees at Sea (1979–80). This time using
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusaas a model, Nerdrum portrayed the plight
of the Vietnamese boat people, presenting them as heroically fleeing the
recently triumphant communist regime in their homeland and thus as
martyrs to a left-wing tyranny.^30 Evidently Nerdrum was an equal
opportunity social critic, calling into question regimes on both the left
and the right. As a number of commentators have pointed out,
Nerdrum’s impulses at this time were in fact anarchist rather than com-
munist. Influenced by a number of anarchist thinkers, he was challeng-
ing state authority in all its forms.^31
In the early phase of his painting, Nerdrum often focuses on human
suffering, with a strong suggestion that it is caused—or at least not ame-
liorated—by the state. He singles out isolated figures living on the
fringes of society, rejected for one reason or another, as in Morning
(1972), The Shadow(1973–80), and Abandoned(1977–78). As Hansen
characterizes this phase of Nerdrum’s career: “During the seventies
Nerdrum’s motifs focused on society’s underdogs. He painted prisoners,
social outcasts and poverty. A common trait is a focus on the individual22 Paul A. Cantor