Self-Portrait of the Prophet of Painting (The Savior of Painting), 1997, oil; via The Nerdrum Institute
It is audacious to take the old masters as inspiration, but Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum has done so with unusual skill. The New Criterion’s own Roger Kimball once called him “one of the most brilliant painters now working”, who has “absorbed Caravaggio and Rembrandt down to his fingertips,” while the late Hilton Kramer referred to him as a “master of the figurative style.” Yet Nerdrum’s artistic liberty has been radically compromised by a recent decision of the Norwegian Court of Appeal. On Monday, Nerdrum was sentenced to 20-months in prison for tax fraud. As a prisoner, Nerdrum cannot engage in “commercial activities”—meaning he is now an artist forbidden to paint.
While the new sentence is a reduced one, down from the original 34-month sentence given in June 2012, it has provoked outraged responses in the US and abroad. Some have claimed that the denial of freedom of expression is a trespass of human rights, noting that the fairness of his trial had been contested from the very beginning.
Nerdrum’s defense lies in his artistic experimentation. In the 1980s, he began to paint with a mixture of mastic and linseed oil; unbeknownst to him, this medium would start to drip and melt over the years when exposed to heat, leading to the slow disintegration of many of his paintings. Nerdrum had a period of prolific artistic production between 1998 and 2002, which he describes as an attempt to appease dissatisfied customers by replacing damaged paintings free of charge. But during these years he also set aside money in an overseas bank account, reputedly as a safety net in case customers with the defective paintings demanded compensation. The Norwegian IRS interpreted this store of money differently: they believed that Nerdrum was in fact painting for profit, selling his paintings on the sly, and evading millions of dollars in taxes by doing so.
Despite Nerdrum’s legal troubles, he has accrued a vocal army of supporters thanks to his distinctive artistic style. He paints with a darkened palette and his subjects often read as isolated or despondent, conveying the terror of life with unnerving accuracy. His compositions, reminiscent of those of the old masters, are even more unusual considering he trained in an environment that favored the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein. Nerdrum’s striking artistic voice has long been at odds with the modern status quo, but it seems that the Norwegian courts now seek to quell it entirely—rendering him, in his own words, “the first art-political prisoner in Europe.”