What distinguishes Nerdrum is thus the fact that as an artist he is
anti-state, not just in the practical sense that he has as little as possible
to do with the whole world of state-supported art, but in the deeper, the-
oretical sense that he does not view the modern state as the genuine ful-
fillment of human destiny. As his early paintings suggest, for Nerdrum,
if the modern project has culminated in the welfare state, then moder-
nity has failed. Its progress, and above all its claim to bring happiness to
humanity, are an illusion. Far from being the gateway to the future, artis-
tically and otherwise, the modern state for Nerdrum has turned out to be
a dead end. But if the modern state has failed to deliver on its promises,
where do we go from here, and, especially for Nerdrum as a painter,
where does art go from here? Such considerations no doubt lay behind
Nerdrum’s rethinking of his art in the early 1980s and led to his radical
reconception of his role as a painter. He decided to try to imagine and
depict what life would be like without the modern state. Nerdrum’s con-
viction that modern society distorts human nature means that he could
not capture the essence of humanity as long as he painted contemporary
and especially urban scenes. This explains his turn to his new subject
matter in the 1980s—the evocation of human beings in a primitive and
even primeval condition, stripped of almost all the trappings of civiliza-
tion and wandering through a barren landscape, leading a fugitive and
frontier existence and eking out the barest living from a harsh environ-
ment, surviving at the very borders of humanity, what Nerdrum called
“the bounds of necessity in life.”^43 As Nerdrum wrote: “Man must be
driven out onto the plains. Being driven out onto the plains means com-
ing back to the essential, to the starting point. When man feels betrayed
by society it is his right to return to a natural state.”^44VII
The second and mature phase of Nerdrum’s paintings thus involves an
attempt to portray the state of nature. But it is not the state of nature of
Rousseau, a realm where man is naturally good and at peace. Rather, it
is much closer to the state of nature as conceived by Hobbes—where the
life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and he experi-
ences the “war of every man against every man” (Leviathan, Chapter
13).^45 Perhaps the best way to conceptualize Nerdrum’s state of nature is
as the antithesis of the welfare state. In opposition to the communal
spirit of modernity, he creates a grim world of rugged individualists,
engaged in a Darwinian struggle for existence, with a strong sense that
only the fittest will survive.^46 As is appropriate to the Icelandic settings28 Paul A. Cantor