Releasing control. Basic instinct ; The guiding lights : Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne ; Color and fauvism ; Expressionism and angst ; Primitivism : "the wisdom of savages" ; Sex and sublimation : exciting the whole machine ; Anarchism ; Violence, war, and guns ; Journeys inward : the Symbolist strand
Paris, capital of the Modern art world. The artistic Mecca ; Paris and Germany ; Paris and London ; Paris and Russia ; Paris and the rest of Europe
Losing control. Trouble with women ; Descent into madness : the case of Edvard Munch ; Altered states : drugs and alcohol ; Alienation from the public ; Suicide, death, morbidity ; Studio gruffness and the rewriting of history
Beyond instinct. Breaking boundaries ; Supermen ; Abstraction ; The blaue reiter ; Matisse : beyond fauvism ; Picasso and Cubism ; Futurism : beautiful ideas that kill ; Pioneers of Modernism : dealers and collectors of New Art
Keeping control. Call the police : academicism and conservative taste ; Wriggle and chiffon : fashionable portraitists ; Railroads and Rembrandts : dealers and collectors of Old Art ; Heritage, museums, and national collections
Finale : August 1949 - art suspended.