You can’t really ignore Friedrich Nietzsche. His philosophical ideas about the will to power, slave morality and the elevation of the Übermensch were crudely distorted by his sister and passed on to Hitler. Long before Hitler, though, Nietzsche was a major source of inspiration for many artists, including Nordic ones such as Willumsen, Munch, Strindberg, Vigeland and Tegner. Strindberg became his first international disciple – he wrote fan letters to Nietzsche. What fascinated Strindberg were the ideas about how the strong survive and the weak must perish, as well as the ideal of freedom.

Nietzsche’s break with bourgeois norms was also reflected in his private life. In 1882, together with the Russian-Jewish writer Lou Andreas-Salomé and the Jewish philosopher Paul Rée, he formed a close intellectual and personal fellowship. Both Nietzsche and Rée were deeply fascinated by Lou Andreas-Salomé. Nietzsche went so far as to propose to her twice but was flatly rejected both times. Instead, she suggested something else: a community in which the three of them could live and work together as free thinkers.

This ménage à trois is also the subject of the 1977 film Beyond Good and Evil by the Italian director Liliana Cavani (of The Night Porter fame) in which, among other things, a bottle is inserted into Rée’s backside. The film recreates the famous photograph of the three of them taken in Lucerne.

Incidentally, Nietzsche was hated and reviled as right-wing and misogynistic by the various communists who were regular visitors to my childhood home. When, at nineteen, I visited the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, my own fascination with Nietzsche was at its height. The self-portrait I used when I applied to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was titled On the Way to Zarathustra, after Nietzsche’s book. In awe and reverence, I made my way up the stairs to the top floor, where Nietzsche’s death mask was displayed in a small room.

As the original death mask must always remain there, resting on a small cushion in a glass case, the version shown in the exhibition is an exact copy made from a 3D scan.