Odd Nerdrum

Biography

In 1979–1980 Nerdrum painted “Refugees at Sea”: a canvas of roughly 3.4 by 5 metres showing twenty-seven Vietnamese boat people. He later described the picture himself as sentimental, even “cloying”, and considered it the end of one phase.

He was born on 8 April 1944 in Helsingborg. His parents, Johan Nerdrum, a lawyer and later an airline director, and Edith Marie (Lillemor) Nerdrum, a shipowner’s daughter, had been sent from German-occupied Norway to Sweden to direct guerrilla activities from outside the country. At the end of the war the family returned to Oslo. In 1950 his parents divorced, and his mother raised the two sons alone. As an adult, in the 1990s, the artist learned that his biological father was the architect David Sandved; in the critic Richard Vine’s view, this story deepened Nerdrum’s interest in origins and personal identity, and he painted pictures about it.

From 1951 he attended the Waldorf school in Oslo, where his teacher was the writer Jens Bjørneboe. Under the anthroposophic principles on which the school was founded, teaching relied on movement, dramatic enactments and musical exercises. The scholar Jan-Erik Ebbestad Hansen traces to anthroposophy Nerdrum’s later distrust of rationalism, his dislike of modern technology and his attachment to older cultural traditions.

Then came the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Nerdrum was dissatisfied with the direction of modern art, in particular the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and began to teach himself to paint, taking Rembrandt as his guide. The decisive experience was seeing Rembrandt’s “The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis” in the National Museum in Stockholm. He said it was a shock, “like finding home”. By his own account he was driven out of the academy “like a scroungy mutt”. He later studied with Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, but felt like an outsider there too: his fellow students nicknamed him “Zorn”, after the Swedish painter of flesh. From the 1960s he exhibited in Norway, and since the 1980s he has taken in students at his home in France, Iceland and, today, Norway and Sweden.

His early work, up to about 1982, consists of large polemical canvases with precisely rendered details of the period: clothing, the model of a bicycle in “The Arrest”. In 1968 he saw Caravaggio for the first time, and the raking light, deep shadow and faces of ordinary people remained a model for him for many years. At the same time he read Rudolf Steiner, William Blake, Dostoevsky and Swedenborg.

The turning point came in 1981. In “Twilight” a young woman is seen from behind, alone in a wood; nothing in the picture is idealised. The canvases have fewer figures, and still lifes shrink to a brick or a loaf of bread. The people in the paintings wear something timeless: furs, skins, leather caps. The landscapes are harsh and empty, as if after a catastrophe. He works in a traditional way: he grinds his own pigments, stretches his own canvases and paints from live models, often himself and members of his family. In 2011 he admitted that the mixture of oils and wax he had used in the 1980s proved faulty: the paint ran and disintegrated.

In the late 1990s he declared himself a kitsch painter. At first this was taken for a joke; then articles and books appeared, and the manifesto “On Kitsch” (2001) explains the difference between kitsch and art. A movement of students grew up around him, who call themselves kitsch painters. Norwegian critics have mostly received him negatively, and he himself believes he is pursued by a modernist establishment. Among the paintings often mentioned in connection with him are “The Murder of Andreas Baader” (1977–1978) and “Self-Portrait in Golden Armour” (1998). “Dawn” belonged to David Bowie, and the director Tarsem Singh has said that a scene in the film “The Cell” (2000) was inspired by this painting.

In 2011 Nerdrum was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to two years in prison; he regarded the case as political. His defence explained that a large sum in Austria was a fund against possible claims over thirty-six paintings of the 1980s made with an experimental medium. The sentence was criticised as severe. In 2012 the court of appeal allowed a new trial, which ended in a sentence of two years and ten months. On 5 February 2013 the Supreme Court set the verdict aside because of procedural errors. In 2014 he was again found guilty and sentenced to twenty months, eight of them suspended. His request for a pardon was rejected in 2016, and on 22 September 2017 King Harald V pardoned him.