turned their backs on her and she has fallen into the hands of two nurses
who are about to swaddle her in a cloak. Vine describes the painting as:a heart-breaking depiction of a huddled young woman, nude except for
panties, being “taken away” by two women in white coats while her grief-
stricken parents avert their faces and a sheepish younger sister looks on with
curiosity and fear. All of the participants show signs of guilt; all seem impli-
cated in personal and societal feelings that have led to this extreme meas-
ure—the removal of a damaged individual from the community of citizens.
The painter’s view is at once clinical and tragic, merciless in its attention to
detail—e.g., the dirt on the soles of the sick girl’s bare feet—yet tender in
its empathy with characters caught up in circumstances beyond their con-
trol. (Vine, Nerdrum, 40)Vine’s last observation is exactly right and important—all the characters
are caught up and participate in this sad business. The two women in
white coats, the two “experts” who are the institutional representatives
of a “caring” society, are not in fact presented as the saviors of the situ-
ation. They may well be taking the woman away to a worse fate. Living
in Scandinavia, the home and supposed model of the modern welfare
state, Nerdrum chooses not to celebrate its virtues in his paintings but
instead suggests a kind of clinical coldness to its care, which seems
more carceral than pastoral in its operation. In 1973, he produced a
sketch ironically entitled Social Security, which presents an elderly
woman trembling on a bed. As Hansen writes, “in her face we can read
of the years of toil and failures—an expression that elicits the viewer’s
compassion for this loser in the struggle for the wealth and benefits of
the welfare state.”^36
Evidently Nerdrum has no more confidence in the state’s ability to
take care of the elderly than he does in its ability to take care of artists.
What unites Nerdrum’s critique of modern art and his critique of modern
society is his sense of the dangers and debilitating effects of becoming a
ward of the state.^37 State support for the artist, far from promoting his
creativity, actually stifles it, or at least misdirects it. Similarly, Nerdrum
shows government intervention in society working to destroy community
rather than to build it; in particular, he pictures authority figures break-
ing up families. The underlying message of Nerdrum’s early paintings
appears to be that human beings cannot fulfill themselves in society as
organized by the modern state. It frustrates their desires and thwarts their
development, forcing them into futile gestures of criminality and rebel-
lion, which lead only to greater forms of repression. Already in his early24 Paul A. Cantor