From next week, the Courtauld plays host to a seminal Munch collection. Joanna Moorhead reports from Norway on Rasmus Meyer’s extraordinary holdings

When I told friends I was off to Bergen to see works by Edvard Munch that would soon be in London for a new show, everyone had the same question. Would The Scream be in the exhibition? The 1893 piece (there are actually four versions, but this was the first) is one of those works of art that has a life of its own: it’s been ­borrowed, parodied, imitated for decades – and it’s been a source of inspiration for everyone from Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon to Wes Craven and the production teams at Doctor Who and The Simpsons.

You don’t have to spend long with The Scream to get a sense of why it’s become an artistic megastar. Like all works of art that enter the universal human imagination, this one speaks to all of us at a deep level: the figure is androgynous (how twenty-first ­century is that?) and the primal shriek (‘The Shriek’ is actually its name in Norwegian) would be recognisable to any human being who ever lived. This is about terror, change, fear, foreboding. In art history it’s assumed to be the moment that sums up a new chapter in history, the move from a believing to a non-believing society; the existential crisis that humanity faces now it has dispensed with God. Today, it’s also about humanity’s place in nature: sea, sand and sun swirl around the central figure, a reminder of the predicament we face.