Two works by Edvard Munch that the Nazis classified as degenerate before selling them for profit are to be offered at auction in London next month, at a time when interest in the Norwegian artist has never been bigger. A self-portrait painted in 1926, the first formal portrait of Munch to come to auction for 15 years, and Embrace on the Beach, painted for a children’s nursery in 1904 and last on sale more than 80 years ago, are due to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s next month. The influence of Munch and his Nordic melancholy has hardly felt more contemporary than at present. In a show that opened in November at the Royal Academy in London, works by Munch appeared alongside those of the British artist Tracey Emin, who considers him her childhood hero. It attracted considerable international interest despite having to be suspended soon after opening because of lockdown restrictions. A new Munchmuseet (Munch Museum) estimated to have cost £250m is due to open on Oslo’s riverside this summer, rescuing the artists’ works from a venue in the suburbs and putting Munch – Norway’s biggest cultural export – centre stage. “It’s a very opportune moment for these works to be coming to auction,” said Simon Shaw, the vice-chair of fine arts at Sotheby’s. The Covid-19 pandemic, with the focus it had brought on solitude and self-reflection, had given the artist, who was proficient at marketing his own misery, “a whole new meaning”, he said. “He’s there with us, in the death and disease; he nearly died of TB, and had Spanish flu and survived. There’s even a picture of him in his dressing gown when he was sick, called Self-portrait and the Spanish Flu,” Shaw said. “The current pandemic in all its aspects has been good for Munch, in that it pushes us back to the issues which were important to him, back to the very stuff of life, in all its messy and lyrical moments. It’s drawn people to a greater understanding and appreciation of his work.” A pastel version of his most famous work, The Scream, so popular a depiction of the human condition that it has become an emoji expressing despair, sold at auction in May 2012 for nearly $120m (then worth £74m). Self-portrait, depicting a self-assured Munch in his 60s but painted with the vigour of a young man, and Embrace on the Beach, a commission for his patron to decorate the family nursery, later transformed into a scene of turmoil by the addition of the anxious embrace of a couple, are expected to secure only a fraction of that, estimated at £4.5m-£6.5m and £9m-£12m respectively. But Shaw said the works were of a quality and importance rarely seen at auction, and had a fascinating backstory. Considered too pioneering and rebellious for his native Norway, Munch found resonance in Germany and a big following for his work, so that it became his second home. “German critics and collectors are what made him,” Shaw said. German museums were among the biggest collectors of his works, until the Nazis came to power. Munch was placed among 112 artists whose works were labelled entartete kunst, or degenerate. Of more than 16,000 works banished from public collections in Germany in 1933, 83 were by Munch. The self-portrait, which had been bought by the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1926, was deaccessioned – officially removed from the collection – in August 1937. Embrace on the Beach, acquired by Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1931, was removed from that collection two months later. Hermann Göring, the Nazi military leader who later turned his attention to collecting artworks stolen from Jewish citizens, bought the paintings for a fraction of their real value. They were subsequently acquired by Thomas Olsen, a shipowner and friend of Munch’s, who rescued them along with two dozen other Munch works, including one edition of The Scream, storing them in a hay barn at the family mountain farm in Sandbu, a village in the fjords of the remote district of Vaagaa, before he and his family fled to safety in Britain shortly the German invasion of Norway in 1940. Pandemic rules permitting, the two paintings will be on display in Sotheby’s in New York in late February and then in Taipei and Hong Kong in early March before their showing in London. The auction on 25 March will be broadcast live from Sotheby’s London salesroom via its website.