Odd Nerdrum and the school of Kitsch

While the scholars of the 50s and 60s were busy studying and writing a deluge of texts meant to chronicle and theorize modern Art (note the capital “A”), Tom Wolfe quietly penned a comparatively brief essay in which he wrote, “According to [a New York Times Article on the state of Modern Art], without a comprehensive theory behind it, I can’t see a painting.” The essay was called “The Painted Word,” and it observed the transition among the art elites from a focus on craftsmanship, skill, and signification, to one that favored the flatness and meaningless purity of the “picture plane,” and ultimately, to the theories themselves which allegedly substantiated the going rate for those paintings.

At its most basic level, Wolfe’s essay gave an unpretentious yet intellectual nod to that guy at MOMA who mutters to himself, “My daughter can paint better than that.”

So when I saw “The Murder of Andreas Baader,” a painting by a man called Odd Nerdrum, my initial impulse was to locate the work historically somewhere around the Baroque Renaissance. The attention to detail, realism, and technique all pointed in a pre-modern direction, and yet the icons of the painting—the trenchcoat, the pistol, and the subject (Baader was an early leader of the Red Army Faction)—revealed the contemporary status of the painting.

Eureka! The man can paint! A true Artisté among the counterfeiters! But wait, Nerdrum refuses to call himself an artist, and will be referred to only as a “kitsch painter.” And it only gets weirder.

If you check out the site, you'll find that the Kitsch dogma exhibits its own fair share of pedantry, but I think this sums up the mantra quiet nicely:

Do not allow Art to retain its moral authority over ability.