its demands. Then there is a kind of feeling of freedom. Happiness is
escaping, being set free.”^61VIII
Where does the strange world of Nerdrum’s major paintings come from?
Many commentators have seen it as post-apocalyptic, the result of some
catastrophe that has destroyed modern civilization. Some have sug-
gested that Nerdrum is portraying the world after a nuclear holocaust,
and point to the black clouds that loom ominously on the horizon in
some of his paintings as perhaps radioactive (The Black Cloud[1986];
The Cloud[1985–93]).^62 This is undoubtedly too specific an explanation
of what has brought about the world Nerdum portrays, but he has
insisted that it is a world of the future; he said that he portrays man “after
he has rebelled and fled our civilization in order to create a world of his
own.”^63 If nothing else, the ubiquitous guns in Nerdrum’s world point to
the fact that it comes after modern civilization. There are many senses
of the term in which Nerdrum can be described as postmodern, but there
is one way in which he is literally so.^64 His paintings portray a post-mod-
ern world, the world that comes after the collapse of modern civilization
and in particular the modern state. And although Nerdrum portrays this
world as wrecked and enormously reduced in its resources, he also sees
it as in its own way liberating, freeing humanity from the prison-house
of modernity and modernism. Stripped of all civilization, human beings
are free to get back in touch with their own nature, which modernity
attempted to hide from sight.
As we have seen, Nerdrum views modernism as resting on a faith in
progress, and hence a linear view of history, which always tries to leave
the past behind as dead and buried. The modernists saw themselves as
coming at the end of history; indeed they viewed all history as leading
up to them and culminating in their art.^65 Modernism is the art to end all
art; that is why modernists insist that their art is the only true art, and
will forever be the art of the future. No art is ever to supersede mod-
ernism. Nerdrum obviously disagrees with this view of the history of
art, because he hopes to move beyond modernism in his own painting,
and he believes that the only way to take a step forward is to take a step
back, and learn from the Old Masters. That is why Nerdrum is attracted
to a cyclical rather than a linear view of history. He says of his paintings:
“Dates, for example, do not exist in this world, because it has nothing to
do with the linear way of thinking in our civilization. Time has dissolved
into eternity with no beginning and no end.”^6634 Paul A. Cantor