Art history has a way of humbling its critics. Canvases that were once mocked, scorned, or dismissed as incompetent now hang in the world’s greatest museums, protected by bulletproof glass and insured for sums that would have seemed absurd to the people who first called them failures. The gap between a painting’s original reception and its eventual place in culture can be staggering.
What changes is rarely the painting itself. It’s the world around it. Tastes shift, movements rise, and what once looked chaotic or offensive slowly reveals a kind of logic that earlier viewers simply weren’t equipped to see. These seven works tell that story as well as any.
1. Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863)
When Manet’s “Olympia” appeared at the 1865 Salon, it was considered so scandalous that pregnant visitors were reportedly advised to keep their distance. Critics decried its “color patches” and called the subject a “yellow-bellied odalisque.” The painting broke with classical tradition by showing a nude woman not as a mythological goddess, but as a modern courtesan staring boldly at the viewer with almost confrontational confidence. Manet was also hit with criticism for his unconventional use of perspective and his unadorned brushwork.
Today, “Olympia” is housed in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and is recognized as a daring work produced by an artist who fundamentally challenged the conservative French art establishment of the 1860s. It is now widely regarded as one of the most important paintings of the 19th century, laying groundwork for modern art and influencing generations of artists who followed. The painting that once cleared rooms now draws massive crowds.
2. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889)
Van Gogh himself was critical of the painting, referring to it as a “failure” in letters to his brother, Theo. The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting painted in June 1889, depicting the view from the east-facing window of Van Gogh’s asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. Early critics were not convinced either. When exhibitions of Van Gogh’s work were held, Starry Night itself was slammed, with one critic likening the stars to fried dough balls eaten in Holland on New Year’s Eve.
Since 1941, The Starry Night has been part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired for just $5,000 from Van Gogh’s sister-in-law. The painting has never appeared at auction, making its market value speculative, though its unmatched fame suggests that if it were ever sold, it would likely set a record as the most expensive artwork in history. From a dismissed failure to an irreplaceable icon, few reversals of fortune in art are this complete.
3. Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” (1642)
Militia group portraits traditionally depicted their members in neat rows or at a banquet. Rembrandt’s version, however, made the prosaic subject into a dynamic work of art, overturning the conventions of traditional portraiture with masterful chiaroscuro and dramatic action. Due to the painting’s overall dark coloring and selective highlighting of just two figures, questions about Rembrandt’s intentions arose early on. His own pupil, Van Hoogstraten, complained that he would have preferred Rembrandt to have “kindled more light into it.”
Contrary to popular myth, the painting was not rejected by its commissioners, but it has suffered numerous indignities in its nearly 400-year history. In 1715, it was cut down to fit between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall, and its name arrived at the end of the 18th century on account of varnish and dirt that had darkened it into a nighttime scene. The Night Watch has enjoyed pride of place in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour from the moment the museum opened in 1885, and it remains the most celebrated work in the collection, drawing visitors from across the world.
4. Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872)
The name of the Impressionist style itself derives from the title of this Claude Monet work, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term “Impressionism” in a satirical 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. The label was intended as ridicule. The Impressionists’ loose brushwork and emphasis on color over form were widely criticized by the art establishment of the time, and Monet’s paintings were considered “unfinished” or “sloppy” by many critics who saw his work as a departure from the classical traditions of painting.
The Musée de Luxembourg in Paris mounted the first museum exhibition of Impressionist art in 1897, and an exhibition at the 1900 World Exposition sealed the artists’ reputations. Paintings sold twenty-five years earlier for a mere fifty francs now fetched 50,000 francs. “Impression, Sunrise” is now held at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and is considered the painting that gave an entire movement its name. The insult became a badge of honor, and that has never changed.
5. Paul Cézanne’s “Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier” (1893–94)
Cézanne had a particularly hard road to success. His work was routinely rejected when it was submitted to the exhibition of the Fine Arts Academy. When Cézanne exhibited in the independent Impressionist exhibitions, he was singled out for particular criticism, often being described as a “madman.” Of Cézanne’s bold brushstrokes and dreamlike composition, French art critic Marc de Montifaud wrote that Cézanne “merely gives the impression of being a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens.” Audiences genuinely struggled to understand what they were looking at.
It is ironic that a century later, three of the five most expensive Impressionist paintings are Cézannes. “Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier,” one of his celebrated still lifes, was painted between 1893 and 1894 and, though not mentioned in the title, contains a number of apples, a Cézanne favourite. The man who was mocked for painting fruit now commands prices that reflect his standing as one of the foundational figures of modern art.
6. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893)
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch, now in the National Museum in Oslo, was inspired by Munch’s troubled life and captures a figure covering his ears, encapsulating the rawness and anxiety of being human. When it first appeared, its distorted lines and anguished figure struck many viewers as garish and deeply unsettling. The jagged landscape and contorted face were far outside the visual language most audiences knew or accepted. It looked, to many, less like art and more like a symptom.
Thieves have frequently targeted “The Scream.” In February 1994, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, two men stole the painting from Oslo’s National Gallery, leaving a note reading “Thanks for the poor security.” The painting was recovered shortly afterwards, following a joint British and Norwegian sting operation. One of the pastel versions of The Scream was sold by Sotheby’s in 2012 for a then-pastel world record of $120 million, following a twelve-minute bidding war. Few works illustrate the reversal from oddity to obsession more dramatically.
7. Wassily Kandinsky’s “Composition VII” (1913)
Kandinsky’s “Composition VII” was met with a lot of head-shaking when it debuted. Abstract art wasn’t mainstream, and critics struggled to make sense of its swirling chaos. Many wrote it off as messy and meaningless. Since the 20th century, many artists had sought to work with more “exploded” forms of painting, styles that disrupt figuration and challenge or distort our perception of reality, but in 1913, audiences simply weren’t ready for Kandinsky’s full leap into pure abstraction. The idea that a painting could communicate emotion through color and form alone, without depicting anything recognizable, seemed not just odd but outright fraudulent to many critics.
As Kandinsky’s ideas about art and emotion took hold, the painting’s vibrant colors and energetic forms found new fans. By 2017, it was valued at around $100 million, its once-criticized “weirdness” now celebrated for capturing the slippery, surreal nature of memory itself. Housed today at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, “Composition VII” is widely considered one of the most ambitious and complex abstract paintings ever made. What once looked like chaos now reads as a carefully constructed emotional universe.
The thread running through all seven of these works is not just a change in taste. It’s a shift in the tools people brought to looking. When viewers lacked the context, the movements, or simply the time that these paintings demanded, rejection was almost inevitable. What’s quietly extraordinary is that the works survived long enough to be understood.
