Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum turned 80 last year. In the first episode of the reality series The Nerdrum Family on NRK, we learn that he has been nursing a hope that the state would eventually erect a museum in his honour. But his patience has run out, and the family has now taken matters into their own hands. The Nerdrum Museum opened last spring in Stavern, a small town at the mouth of the Larvik fjord, and houses a number of the painter’s supposedly “most important” paintings, which he has held on to with his future museum in mind. What’s most interesting about this project, and the series overall, is not the story of the spurned genius who has to orchestrate his own public rehabilitation, but what this impatience for recognition from his contemporaries – whom he otherwise despises – tells us about the conditions for the timeless quality Nerdrum aspires to.
Nerdrum is a figurative painter who for five decades has made a ruckus in Norwegian public life by claiming that he is being opposed by a cabal of modernist gatekeepers and a state bureaucracy that cannot tolerate exceptional individuals. Unlike the aesthetic opportunists who populate the domestic art scene, Nerdrum adheres to classical ideals. This has led to him being subject to an unprecedented witch hunt throughout his career, or so he claims. The campaign of persecution culminated in a prolonged court case where he was sentenced to prison for tax evasion, but finally pardoned by the king. That the reception of Nerdrum’s art by Norwegian critics has been consistently dismissive and at times down right mean seems beyond doubt. But despite this opposition, he has been remarkably successful compared to most of his peers, and he is represented in the collections of renowned museums worldwide.
The series also features Odd’s wife Turid, his sons Bork and Öde, and daughters Myndin and Aftur, as well as a handful of in-laws and grandchildren. (He has three daughters from a previous marriage who are not in the series.) The clan lives on a farm in idyllic Stavern along with a rotating group of students who come there to study under the master. Life on the farm revolves around the cultivation of classical art. Myndin, who mostly stays in the background, is a painter and the only one of the siblings who doesn’t live on the farm. Aftur writes poetry and is the literary editor of the conservative culture magazine Sivilisasjonen (Civilisation). The eldest son Bork hosts a podcast about culture and philosophy, while Öde – the Nerdrum child who has enjoyed the most public exposure so far, including participation in another reality series, Farmen kjendis (Celebrity Farm) – is a jack of all trades who appears in the roles of architect, graphic designer, and, not least, museum founder. He is also a pianist and a painter. The siblings’ stated ambition is identical to their father’s: to restore classical ideals. This involves taking an amalgamation of traditional craftsmanship and what they call kitsch – for them a positive term denoting meticulous figurative motifs with strong emotional appeal – as a model for art.
The term “classical,” Öde explains, was coined by the Romans as a designation for a period in Greek history they believed excelled in producing art of particularly high quality. To strive toward this perfection is to create art that touches us as humans regardless of time and place. Modernism (a term the Nerdrums give a pretty loose meaning to and that does a lot of work in their totalising characterisation of the present) equips art with the opposite imperative: to primarily be of and for its time. This, consequently, turns it into a tireless trend hunt. Granted, there is something ahistorical and a little shifty about much contemporary art, which appears more concerned with signalling to the in-group than convincing a broader audience. But this paradigm has already been in retreat for a while. As art has had to adapt to the visibility conditions of network media, efforts to communicate in more immediate ways, not so different from kitsch, have gained priority.
Moreover, the Nerdrums’ retro-guard critique of modernity has become pretty mainstream in the political discourse and has lost its oppositional aura. Atypically, the family intones these attitudes with the cadence of your great grandfather, dressed as creatures out of a Rembrandt painting – they keep their own tailor, whose creations are for sale on Nerdrum’s website. But this contrived 1600s LARP only makes their project feel even more a part of the cultural moment they claim to be at odds with. The Nerdrums’ carefully honed mix of philosophical quasi-profundities, sentimental tributes to ‘true art’, mild political provocation, and Instagram-friendly posing incarnates precisely the impatient jostling for visibility and recognition that is one of contemporary culture’s most distinct features. The Nerdrum media savvy isn’t new, though. Since the early 1980s, Odd’s practice has been symbiotic with generating public attention around his person, with countless TV appearances and newspaper features, usually prompted by some provocative statement. The family’s incursion into reality TV merely updates this pact with the press.
Peak irony is reached when none other than Bjarne Melgaard rolls into the yard in a blue Porsche, like an unexpected gust from the despised contemporary art scene. After a decidedly awkward conversation between Melgaard and Nerdrum in the latter’s studio, which leaves a clear impression that the meeting is staged, a joint exhibition at Fineart Oslo is arranged. The collaboration is nakedly motivated by profit, the gallerist literally lurking in the wings rubbing his hands. A reasonable interpretation of the scene is that Nerdrum compromises his moral-aesthetic conviction to boost a project that has lost much of its provocative force. But his affiliation with the enemy doesn’t seem to make much of a dent in the Nerdrums’ militant us-versus-them mentality. And it’s telling that NRK refrains from problematising the collaboration in light of this constructed antagonism. The evasion makes clear the series’ somewhat conflict-avoidant method and reveals an element of mutual exploitation; the channel gets a jolt to its viewer numbers (which have been formidable) in return for giving the Nerdrums hours of free advertising for their family business.
“All my life I’ve felt as if I’m living in a film,” Aftur confides to her boyfriend Daniel, who has just praised her for being so good at making situations memorable. This notion of life as a film set explains the pervasive artificiality in the Nerdrums’ behaviour, how they constantly conduct and express themselves as if they’re onstage, even in quite intimate situations. A naturalised artificiality, since it doesn’t seem like a response to the TV-cameras suddenly intruding on their lives. You sense the costumed and self-observing behaviour has been encouraged from birth, their lives one long dress rehearsal for the show they are now starring in. Right after she is born, Aftur’s daughter Myte (which, fittingly, translates to Myth) models for her grandfather. The session is a family tradition, and in a later episode we also become acquainted with the baby portraits of Bork and Öde. Modelling for a painter is of course different than appearing before a camera, but these ritualised perpetuations of the newborn, a kind of alternative baptism, give a hint about how ingrained mediation is in the family’s daily life and self-understanding.
Except for the master himself (and maybe Myndin), none of the Nerdrums give the impression of being more than dilettantes in their respective art forms. Öde is annoyed by a failed drawing and in the series’ final scene he whistles a duet with a harpsichord played by composer, family friend, and Nerdrum Museum director, Martin Romberg. Aftur participates in a low-threshold poetry evening for classically oriented poets at a bar in Oslo. Bork tells about how he as a 12-year-old exchanged the brush for a digital camera and after that has dedicated himself to “the living image,” but apparently uses it mostly to make podcasts. Given their stated commitments to artistic pursuits, assisting their father seems to take up an inordinate amount of time, whether it involves modelling, helping with exhibition logistics, documenting works, building museums, or (with a bizarre mixture of naive hopefulness and intense contempt) writing applications to the Autumn Exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, an annual artist-juried exhibition that has been running since 1882. Is it a recognition – conscious or unconscious – of their lack of identity as independent artists that makes it difficult for them to escape the family farm and life in their father’s charismatic shadow?
In any case, Nerdrum’s offspring devote themselves, if NRK’s depiction of the family is accurate, more to mediation than original creative work. They are influencers in the service of classical culture, on all available platforms: podcast, magazine, museum – and now also reality TV. This conjures up a paradox: in sharp contrast to the mechanisms that govern art distribution in our own historical moment, classical art’s conditions for visibility are mercilessly meritocratic and the discipline requirement for the artist correspondingly high. Spending time on something as unworthy as making one’s own life into soppy mass entertainment would, if one truly subscribed to these virtues, be unthinkable. But the present restoration of classical culture must happen at the level of memes, apparently, and can therefore never achieve more than a Pyrrhic victory; to gain influence it needs the zeitgeist on its side and thus foregoes its essential untimeliness, that is, the trust in posterity’s judgment. No wonder their rush to put a museum in place.
