Let me also – almost inevitably – mention August Strindberg, the author of works such as Miss Julie, which has haunted European stages for more than a century. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that Strindberg also painted. Or rather: that he painted a great deal. The result was a body of work full of a ferocity that still feels startling today. Many have pointed out a certain affinity with J. M. W. Turner, whose paintings Strindberg knew and admired. Both artists share a fascination with nature’s extreme forces – with the sea and the sky in their most dramatic forms.

Strindberg’s marriages and love affairs became an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration for his writing, accompanied by a sustained – and often quite brutal – critique of women. The irony, of course, is that he himself was married three times to women with artistic careers of their own.

One thing that runs through August Strindberg’s work is the way he – like Edvard Munch – turned his own crises into artistic material. His mental breakdown was not hidden away but, on the contrary, written straight into the work. A good example is the book Inferno, in which he describes an attempted suicide that involved wading out into the cold sea on an October day and afterwards lying down on chilly rocks in the freezing wind in the hope of catching a severe pneumonia that would bring his beloved to visit him before death set in. The actual outcome was not dramatic death, just a common cold.

In the 1890s, Strindberg corresponded with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas about will, chaos and creation clearly influenced him. At the same time, he wrote about the role of chance in art – about the way the unforeseen can play a decisive part in the artistic process. Seen in retrospect, this idea anticipates Surrealism’s notions of automatism.

Strindberg’s stay in Denmark was one of the more prolific periods of his life. It was here that he wrote Miss Julie and The Father, and he completed The Confession of a Fool as well. By the time he arrived in Copenhagen, his fame was already so great that the following year he could be seen as a wax figure in the so-called Scandinavian Panopticon on Vesterbrogade — a sort of waxwork cabinet of fame. And yet Strindberg did not exactly feel cherished by the city’s intellectual circles, and in a letter to the writer Axel Lundegård he referred to it as ‘the Copenhagen faecal hell’.

I once had a small run-in with Strindberg when, at the age of nineteen, I sought out the country house in Holte where he had stayed in the summer of 1888. The visit resulted in an article in the local paper entitled ‘On the Edge of Madness in Holte’.