Edvard Munch painted The Scream — the most iconic image of modern anxiety — because he had lived it. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his sister died of the same disease when he was fourteen, another sister was institutionalized for mental illness, and Munch himself spent much of his life battling alcoholism, paranoia, and breakdowns. His art was not symbolism — it was autobiography.

This episode traces Munch from his grief-saturated Norwegian childhood through the paintings that shocked and scandalized European audiences, his nervous breakdown and hospitalization, and the late career in which he painted compulsively until his death.

• The childhood deaths, family mental illness, and the grief that became Munch's artistic fuel
• The Frieze of Life series and the radical expressionism that scandalized Berlin a ...