Edvard Munch, 1863–1944, was a zeitgeist conductor. Like Dostoyevsky before him, like Kafka after him, he was one of those somewhat hastily assembled humans—the skull plates not stapled down, the nerve endings dangling—who get chosen by the daemon of history to bear its message into the world.

Poor bastard. "You paint like a pig, Edvard!" yelled a young realist named Gustav Wentzel, getting in Munch’s face at an 1886 exhibition in Kristiania (now Oslo) that featured his painting The Sick Child. "Shame on you." Munch, at the time, was penniless. His best friends were nihilists. Also alchemists, sadists, diabolists, absinthe fiends, and the occasional haunted dramatist. Ibsen came to his 1895 exhibition, the one that sparked a public debate about Munch’s sanity, and growlingly counseled him: "It will be with you as it was with me. The more enemies you have, the more friends you will have." Strindberg, very mad, was a fellow paranoiac: "As regards Munch, who is now my enemy," he wrote to his editor, "I am certain he will not miss the opportunity to stab me with a poisoned knife." Years later, when Munch was painting on the beach and a gust of wind upended his easel, he blamed Strindberg.

Alienation, God-death, the self as destabilized center of experience—this was the daemon’s message. The full harrowing gospel of modernity. It lived inside Munch, forcing its way along his fibers and blazing out of his doomy Scandinavian eye sockets. It gave him breakdowns and a massive thirst for alcohol. It made him strangely attractive to women. It hospitalized him, several times. He starved, he raved, he was vilified, and—being a great artist—he understood exactly what was happening. "If only one could be the body through which today’s thoughts and feelings flow," he wrote to a friend. "To succumb as a person, yet survive as an individual entity, that is the ideal."