The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum (born 1944) has been exhibiting his work with some regularity in New York since 1983, yet he remains a fugitive figure as far as the official art world is concerned. His paintings are only rarely seen in the museums or discussed in the glossy art journals, and on this side of the Atlantic, anyway, his work almost never turns up in surveys of contemporary art. Even the solo exhibition that toured a number of American museums a couple of years ago, though it undoubtedly made a considerable impression on the people who saw it, failed to establish Mr. Nerdrum as a familiar name. I went to see it in Pittsburgh on the day the international art press had assembled for a preview of the Carnegie International Exhibition, yet very few of the critics, curators, and collectors who had come to town for that event—from which, needless to say, Mr. Nerdrum’s paintings had been excluded—even bothered to take a look at his show.

A large part of the reason is that Mr. Nerdrum’s paintings, with their unsettling, often violent allegorical themes and their unapologetic recourse to a Rembrandtesque pictorial style, repudiate virtually all the reigning orthodoxies of contemporary art. They are proudly anti-modernist, yet they owe little, if anything, to the political posturing of the postmodernist camp. This is an art that doesn’t fit into any of the trends, fashions, or other excitements on offer at the moment, and its flaunting of Old Master methods and a narrative allegorical subject matter leaves at least some of the people who do get to see Mr. Nerdrum’s work quite baffled, if not offended.

The ten paintings from 1996–97 in his latest exhibition at the Forum Gallery are unlikely to alter this situation. Except for two portraits—one of the artist’s daughter and one of himself—they are all paintings on horrific themes. Unarmed Man gives us a seated nude male whose left arm has been amputated at the shoulder and whose right has been amputated just below the elbow. Almost equally unsparing in its melancholy are the elderly naked figures in Three Men at Dawn. Most horrifying of all, perhaps, is the painting called Release, with its ghastly scene of a terrified young woman in the process of being buried alive by a malevolent warrior of some kind.

The scenarios of these allegorical paintings, though without any precise analogues in historical time, are clearly meant to illuminate the moral horrors of our epoch. In this sense, at least, their subject matter and the sense of moral outrage with which it is treated is as "modern" as Guernica. What is so unsettling for many people is, of course, that their style is so radically reactionary— and, what is even more amazing, so persuasive in its reactionary conviction. For Mr. Nerdrum is a master of the figurative style he has fabricated to give his terrifying subjects the moral gravity he believes to be their due. In this respect, too, his art exists at a great distance from much else that nowadays passes for notable achievement.