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 ...

It began, the story goes, with an insult, unless the insult was a compliment—with ambitious young artists, one never knows. Édouard Manet would have been about thirty when he visited the Louvre and ...