When Edouard Manet's painting Olympia is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, it is met with jeers, laughter, criticism, and disdain. It is attacked by the public, the critics, the newspapers.

Édouard Manet was not immune to bad press. In 1864, a year on from scandalizing Parisian mores with his vision of bourgeoisie vice in Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), his follow-up Salon entry was ...

The reason this 1882 painting has become a hit on the social media app X has nothing to do with Manet's radically cold touch, or even the fact that the work is famous at all. Instead, it has to do ...