In Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 painting, a woman—a courtesan, in fact—reclines on a chaise lounge. She is naked and her body is pale, almost muscular, her legs short and knobby. Beneath her, white ...

Manet’s ‘Olympia’ is coming to the Met as part of its ‘Manet/Degas’ exhibition “Olympia” — the Mona Lisa of modern art — has come to America for the first time. Édouard Manet began painting his ...

NEW YORK — The 1865 Paris Salon was the site of grand scandale. “Olympia,” Édouard Manet’s painting of a nude courtesan lolling on a divan, forthrightly blasé alongside her Black maid and jittery cat, ...

NEW YORK — Crowds nudge forward, jostling for position, smartphones raised, waiting for a group of women to finish posing in front of “Olympia.” “Olympia,” if you didn’t know, was scandalous when it ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, 1868–69, Oil on canvas, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan ...

As a general rule, I’m not much of one for speculative history or fiction. I’ll happily admit, for example, that I was deeply unimpressed with George Orwell’s 1984. While I was quickly (and, on my ...