Framing resistance: Mirzoeff’s countervisuality and the politics of seeing in European art from Romanticism to Modernism

Abstract

This paper examines how images shape power and how art can push back. Using Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of countervisuality, or the so-called “right to look,” it investigates how visual culture both upholds and challenges authority. The central question is: how have artists historically used visual strategies to resist dominant narratives and reclaim agency over perception? While much existing scholarship focuses on modern media and surveillance, this study looks further back to show that visual resistance has deep roots. Through close analysis of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Courbet’s The Stone Breakers, Dix’s The War, and Picasso’s Guernica, it traces how artists have interacted with official narratives. The method is interpretive and visual, connecting each artwork to its historical and political moment. These works, by subverting aesthetic norms, and using anonymity, fragmentation, and absence, disrupt heroic narratives, foreground collective suffering, and challenge the viewer’s passive gaze. What emerges is a shared impulse across time: to challenge how power is seen, and who gets to be seen.