Rather than accepting progressivist philosophies of history, like
Hegel’s or Marx’s, Nerdrum was deeply influenced by Oswald
Spengler’s book, The Decline of the West.^67 Spengler presents cultures as
following great cycles, and, as his title suggests, he proclaimed that
modern civilization has passed its peak and is headed for a decline. As
we have seen, Nerdrum tries in his paintings to imagine what a post-
modern world would look like. And with his cyclical sense of history,
the post-modern turns out to take the form of the pre-modern.
Accordingly, although at one point Nerdrum says that his paintings have
a “post-historic look,” at another he says that he portrays “modern man
having returned to a primeval society in his flight from civilization. He
no longer has any roots in our time. He is back in a prehistoric condi-
tion.”^68 Take away the modern state, Nerdrum seems to be saying, and
human beings will regress to their primitive—and more natural—condi-
tion (while still holding on to all those guns, of course). For example,
with the modern state gone, the world of print and perhaps even of writ-
ing disappears. There is no evidence of the written word anywhere in the
paintings of Nerdrum’s major phase.^69 He seems in fact to be portraying
a purely oral society, a pre-literate or, more properly, post-literate world
of Homeric bards or, more properly, Icelandic skalds (The Storyteller
[1988]). There are singers and dancers in Nerdrum’s world, but no
scribes, and certainly no books (The Three Singers [1987–88]; One
Story Singer[1990]; Dancer with Snake[1996]). For wisdom, his char-
acters turn to shamans and prophets (Revier [1985–98]; Sleeping
Prophet[1999–2000]). A painting called Transmission(2000) strongly
suggests a world of oral tradition; an older man is transmitting his wis-
dom to a younger, who learns by direct example and imitation.
Nerdrum’s characters do not share the modernist’s dismissive attitude
toward tradition. Indeed, we see in his later paintings that, in the absence
of the modern state, its rational regime, and its obsession with progress,
tradition regains its original importance in human life. In general,
Nerdrum’s paintings can be viewed as a postmodern attempt to recover
a pre-modern wisdom, a wisdom that has been lost sight of in the mod-
ern world with its hypersophistication and obsession with novelty for
novelty’s sake.
Nerdrum’s quarrel with modernism as a painter is thus part of a
larger quarrel with modernity. His differences from modernism are of
course most clearly evident in his painterly technique. He rejects the
abstraction of modern art in the name of the concrete textures and sen-
suous beauty of traditional art, and he insists on returning to the Old
Masters as his models. But Nerdrum goes beyond mere questions of
The Importance of Being Odd 35