McDonald’s has been a pop culture classic for years now, the most recognisable and popular of the fast food outlets. Andy Warhol even seems to have said that the most beautiful thing in Florence was McDonald’s, perhaps a provocative celebration of all that is popular. The restaurant chain founded in 1955 in California is a classic, and it is precisely on this concept that the new advertising campaign launched in Athens in recent days revolves.
Meant to be Classic places some of the brand’s products within classics of art history, in particular impressionist works by Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in which we can imagine what it would be like to order a packet of Chicken McNuggets inside an elegant café at the end of the 19th century.

At the Folies Berger bar, the melancholy waitress painted by Manet will not offer you absinthe but a portion of chicken croquettes, to be digested with a little ketchup. A trip to Provence is not a bad plan either, with a packed lunch stored inside the unmistakable paper bag with the yellow M that you picked up all those times before escaping from the McDrive.
Two elegant figures talk to each other sitting on a bench in the garden of a conservatory, she in a yellow hat, matching gloves and umbrella, he with a long beard, a black coat and a maxi glass of Coca-Cola stuck through a red and white straw.
By buying this painting in 1896, the Natiolangalerie in Berlin became the first museum in the world to acquire a Manet. A great classic then, like McDonald’s, Nuggets and the cucumber in the hamburger.