In Edvard Munch we have an artist who, in his own time, went against almost every norm going. He painted not what he saw, but what he felt. At the time, this approach, which appealed to me very directly, and which later almost became a cliché in the story of modernism, was seen as a full-on assault on the established view of art. In 1890s Berlin, Munch was part of a scene that also included August Strindberg, whose approach to the dramatic arts I encountered early on, not least through his play Miss Julie.

It was the great age of the artist bohemian, a time when the link between genius and madness was cultivated almost religiously. For the bourgeoisie, this scene was an offensive provocation, culminating in 1892 when an exhibition of Munch’s work was closed down after only a week. The works were described as an outright insult to art.

In 1908, Munch spent seven months in the clinic of the Danish psychiatrist Daniel Jacobson in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen. Most of the works by Munch included in this exhibition date from the period before that breakdown, since Munch’s treatment proved highly destructive to his artistic practice. After his stint in the clinic, he became a kind of Norwegian counterpart to Carl Larsson: idyllic and decorative – with the exception of the powerful The Sun, which was developed for the aula at the University of Oslo.

The fact that the scandal-ridden Munch became something of a national treasure later in life is perhaps one of the small ironies of art history. And the irony does not stop there. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis seized around eighty of Munch’s works from German museums. Several of them were shown in the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich in 1937 as examples of so-called degenerate art – so essentially, they served as cautionary exhibits, examples of what not to do.