Art That Confronts

Franscisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, oil on canvas, 1814

In a previous post, I wrote about art that comforts—the kind of art that steadies us and gives the viewer a small island of calm in an otherwise chaotic world. It’s the visual equivalent of a deep breath.

But not all art is interested in offering that kind of reassurance.

Some art does the opposite. Instead of calming us down, it pokes us in the ribs. Sometimes it even grabs us by the collar and says, Look at this.

This is art that confronts.

Where comforting art offers a pause, confronting art creates friction. It asks questions we might prefer not to answer. It exposes things we might prefer to keep politely out of frame. And while this can make for an unpleasant viewing experience, it is often the kind of art that stays with us the longest.

War, unfortunately, has provided artists with plenty of opportunities to confront viewers with uncomfortable truths. In an earlier post, The Art of War, I discussed how visual artists have responded to the reality of armed conflict. Sadly, the topic remains relevant. Even now, as I write this, the shadow of war stretches across parts of Europe as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine. Likewise, tensions surrounding Iran have escalated into open conflict across parts of the Middle East. Sadly, innocent people are caught in the machinery of events much larger than themselves.

But as I’ve said before, the purpose of this blog is not to take a political stance. It’s to examine our shared human experience through the lens of art.

One of the clearest examples of art that confronts can be found in The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya. Created in 1814, the painting depicts Spanish civilians being executed by soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte during the Peninsular War.

What makes the painting so striking is its bluntness. Earlier historical paintings often portrayed war as something heroic and noble. Flags waved dramatically. Horses reared. Soldiers posed like statues.

Goya stripped all of that away.

The soldiers in The Third of May are faceless and mechanical. Opposite them stands a terrified man with his arms raised, illuminated by a harsh lantern light that forces us to look directly at the moment before death. The painting doesn’t celebrate war. It exposes it.

This approach influenced later artists like Pablo Picasso, whose works Guernica and Massacre in Korea confront viewers with the brutality of modern warfare. Bodies twist and break apart. Mothers scream. Soldiers appear almost machine-like.

None of it is meant to make the viewer comfortable.

Pablo Picasso. Massacre in Korea, oil on plywood, 1951

And yet, war is hardly the only subject artists have used to confront society.

Consider The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell. Rockwell is often remembered for his warm, nostalgic images of American life—children at soda fountains, families gathered around dinner tables, small-town scenes that look suspiciously like everyone gets along.

Then he painted Ruby Bridges walking to school.

In The Problem We All Live With, a young Black girl walks past a wall covered in racist graffiti while U.S. marshals escort her into a newly integrated school. The figures of the marshals are cropped so we only see their torsos, placing all visual emphasis on the child.

It's not a comfortable painting.

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1964

Rockwell could have continued painting cheerful scenes of everyday life—and for many years he did—but in this work he used the same illustrative clarity to confront viewers with a moral reality that many Americans would have preferred to ignore.

Confrontation in art doesn’t always come from subject matter alone. Sometimes it comes from the way an image is constructed.

When Marcel Duchamp placed a porcelain urinal in a gallery and titled it Fountain, he wasn’t confronting viewers with tragedy or injustice. He was confronting them with a question:

What exactly counts as art?

That question has been irritating viewers for over a century now.

Similarly, works like My Bed by Tracey Emin force viewers to confront something more personal: vulnerability, depression, and the messy realities of private life. Standing in front of an unmade bed surrounded by the debris of human existence tends to make people a little uneasy.

Which, again, is the point.

Artists also confront us with the darker aspects of human nature itself. Otto Dix, whose massive triptych The War (Der Krieg) I mentioned previously, did not simply paint battle scenes. Having served in the First World War, Dix painted the physical and psychological aftermath of conflict with an almost brutal honesty.

The central panel of The War is a wasteland of corpses and broken bodies. It makes many traditional historical paintings look almost theatrical by comparison.

And that comparison is worth noting. Works like Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze have become iconic partly because they present history in a way that is easy to admire. The composition is heroic, the symbolism clear.

Reality, as usual, was probably a bit colder and more chaotic than that.

Now, to be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with idealized imagery. Societies need symbols. They need narratives that help them understand who they are. But if those are the only images we allow ourselves to see, our understanding of history becomes…selective.

Art that confronts serves as a corrective.

It reminds us that the world is rarely as neat as we might prefer. It asks uncomfortable questions about power, suffering, morality, and the stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes it challenges entire definitions of what art even is.

And yes, occasionally it leaves us standing in a gallery staring at a urinal, wondering how we got there.

Comforting art helps us breathe.

Confronting art reminds us why we needed that breath in the first place.