The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum (born 1944) has been exhibiting
his work with some regularity in New York since 1983, yet he
remains a fugitive figure as far as the official art world is
concerned. His paintings are only rarely seen in the museums or
discussed in the glossy art journals, and on this side of the
Atlantic, anyway, his work almost never turns up in surveys of
contemporary art. Even the solo exhibition that toured a number of
American museums a couple of years ago, though it undoubtedly made a
considerable impression on the people who saw it, failed to
establish Mr. Nerdrum as a familiar name. I went to see it in
Pittsburgh on the day the international art press had assembled for
a preview of the Carnegie International Exhibition, yet very few
of the critics, curators, and collectors who had come to town for
that event—from which, needless to say, Mr. Nerdrum’s paintings had
been excluded—even bothered to take a look at his show.
A large part of the reason
is that Mr. Nerdrum’s
paintings, with their unsettling, often violent allegorical themes
and their unapologetic recourse to a Rembrandtesque pictorial style,
repudiate virtually all the reigning orthodoxies of contemporary
art. They are proudly anti-modernist, yet they owe little, if
anything, to the political posturing of the postmodernist camp.
This is an art that doesn’t fit into any of the trends,
fashions, or other excitements on offer at the moment, and its
flaunting of Old Master