Exhibition reveals new perspective on Scream artist Munch

The show is designed to throw a light on the paintings which have been overshadowed by his classic masterpiece.

Instead, the exhibition brings together six paintings by the troubled Norwegian artist in his Weeping Woman series for the first time. Munch began the images of a melancholy nude standing next to a bed in 1907.

The paintings have been loaned for the show, Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, from three museums as the show focuses on Munch’s work from the early 20th century but includes his first self-portrait, which he painted as an 18-year-old in 1882.

Other works, such as Self-Portrait With Spanish Flu (1919), record the artist ageing and his vision changing after he suffered an eye haemorrhage.

Self-Portrait: Between The Clock And The Bed, painted a year before his death in 1944, shows a clock without hands and the bed the artist expected to die in.

Munch, who had a nervous breakdown in 1908, blamed his psychosis, which was widely attributed to alcoholism, on “the long years of persecution” towards him and his art.

The exhibition also unites The Sick Child (1907) – drawing upon the death of his sister from tuberculosis – with a 1925 reworking of the same scene.

Munch first painted The Scream in 1893 and one privately-owned version fetched $119.9m (£74m) this year, making it the most expensive artwork ever auctioned.