paintings, Nerdrum is drawn to images of mutilation and dismember-
ment—see, for example, Amputation(1972)—as if to suggest that the
forces of the modern state can only maim and cripple humanity.
VI
Nerdrum’s early paintings portray the members of modern society as
largely passive, often the victims of a system that claims to care for them
but that would just as soon imprison them if they fail to fit into the sys-
tem. In his first phase, Nerdrum thus offers testimony to the failure of
the modern project, especially insofar as it has culminated in the steril-
ity of the welfare state. The fundamental link Nerdrum sees between
modern art and the modern state is that both rest on a belief in progress,
the faith that the world can be remade by the power of reason and
remade for the better: “The twentieth century was, despite all fears,
marked by a sincere belief in progress, a belief that science and tech-
nology would lead us into a new world” (OK, 28). In this respect,
Nerdrum finds Hegel’s philosophy as fundamental to modernism as
Kant’s:
[Hegel] claimed that great art depends on contemporary time and its means,
and that art must accept the values of its time. The artist is not a great artist
unless he is completely bound to his time. This led to an evolutionary opti-
mism which implied that artists build on each other, and that they must con-
stantly create something new and original in history. It is important to be
aware of the fact that the new and the original are closely linked with what
Hegel conceived of as the course of history.... Here we find most of the
basis for the avantgarde dictate of modernism. (OK, 66–67)One can readily understand why Nerdrum would be opposed to the his-
toricism of Hegel. In the historicist view of art, the true painters are
always progressing, with the greatest making major breakthroughs to
new styles. It is on the basis of this kind of historicism that critics con-
demn Nerdrum as a reactionary, and dismiss his return to the Old
Masters as an empty gesture.
But Nerdrum is even more disturbed by the political implications of
the Hegelian foundations of modernist aesthetics, the way a blind faith
in progress links modernism to totalitarianism:
Today, everybody is in agreement that the modernist dominance has had a
liberating effect, for better or for worse. The idea of a new world, where ourThe Importance of Being Odd 25