technique and shows that the abstract character of modern art reflects its
more basic attempt to establish its autonomy, to free itself from depend-
ence on anything outside itself. That means above all that modern art
tries to free itself from any dependence on a public, which paradoxically
takes the form of a demand for so-called public funding of the arts. This
leads in Nerdrum’s view to the fateful alliance between modern art and
the modern state, as modernists hope that national governments will
come to their aid against a philistine public and become their saviors.
Here is the deepest level of Nerdrum’s critique of modernism—it buys
into the ideology of the modern state, and the Hegelian faith in linear
progress on which it rests.^70 Together with the modern state, modern
artists hoped to lead humanity into a new and brighter future, a recon-
struction of the world from the ground up. Most people have come to
recognize the dangers of this view when it took the totalitarian forms of
communism or fascism. But Nerdrum sees the welfare state as partici-
pating in the same modern project, only in a more insidious, because
apparently more benevolent and less autocratic, way. In Nerdrum’s
view—and his early paintings are devoted to showing this—the welfare
state takes us to the same dreary end of history, from which there
appears to be no escape. It seems in fact to be the flat world of
Nietzsche’s Last Man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But however locked
into the modern state modern man may appear to be, the paintings of
Nerdrum’s major phase are designed to provide an escape on the imagi-
native plane. As a painter, he simply wills away the modern state, and
the barren landscapes of Iceland provide him with a real backdrop on
which to project his fantastic vision of a postmodern/pre-modern condi-
tion. It is not, to say the least, a pretty sight, but in Nerdrum’s view, in
contrast to the abstraction of modernism, the very concrete world of his
paintings takes us closer to the truth about humanity and human nature.36 Paul A. Cantor