Odd Nerdrum was born in 1944 in Sweden to Norwegian resistance fighters fleeing German occupation. After the war, they returned to Norway. In 1950, his parents divorced. Decades later, he discovered the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father.
He enrolled at Oslo’s National Academy of Art in 1961. The academy taught modernism and abstraction. Nerdrum wanted Rembrandt and Caravaggio. His professors told him to “buy abstract.” Fellow students mocked him. He was, in his own words, chased from the academy “like a scroungy mutt.”
He taught himself Old Master techniques in museums while living in a condemned apartment building. He studied briefly with Joseph Beuys in 1965. That didn’t work either. Beuys represented everything Nerdrum rejected.
His paintings emerged like visions from another time. Figures in timeless rags standing in volcanic wastelands. Floating bodies in infinite voids. Everything rendered with Rembrandt’s technique but depicting a post-apocalyptic world stripped of civilization.
Norwegian critics hated him. One called him the leader of an “authoritarian personality cult.” The hatred confirmed what Nerdrum already knew. He wasn’t making art. In 1998, he declared his work should be understood as kitsch, not art. He wrote a manifesto that spawned a movement rejecting contemporary art entirely.
The Norwegian establishment ignored him. The rest of the world didn’t. MoMA, The Met, the Hirshhorn acquired his work. His paintings sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In 2011, Norwegian authorities convicted him of tax evasion. He was sentenced to prison. Under Norwegian law, he wouldn’t be allowed to paint while incarcerated. In 2017, King Harald V pardoned him. No explanation given.
In 2024, the Nerdrum Museum opened in Norway. The heretic had become impossible to ignore.
His strengths: Uncompromising commitment to Old Master techniques in an era that rejected them, ability to make apocalyptic visions feel timeless, courage to embrace “kitsch” and build a movement around it, technical mastery rivaling the masters he studied.
Career highlights: Paintings in MoMA, The Met, Hirshhorn; founding the Kitsch Movement; works selling for over $400,000; royal pardon from King Harald V; opening of the Nerdrum Museum in 2024.
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