Gaze

Within the history of representation, the gaze is never merely a physiological act of looking; it is a culturally scripted exchange that encodes authority, desire, and vulnerability. From medieval eyes of God to the introspective self-portrait and the confrontational nude, artists have treated the eye—and the direction or withholding of its look—as a compact symbol of psychic life and social relations. The motifs grouped here under the “Gaze” category map this long trajectory: they show how eyes, eyelids, and facial address become semiotic hinges on which meaning turns, translating abstract relations of power, intimacy, and knowledge into legible visual form.

Semiotically, ocular motifs operate as metonyms of perception itself. The all-seeing eyes, for example, condense diffuse structures of visibility into a single emblem. Their definition as “emblems of visibility, awareness, and guarding attention” makes explicit what religious and political image-making has long understood: a disembodied or multiplied eye can stand for a supra-human gaze that surveils as it protects. Though the current collection lacks concrete works deploying this symbol, the category frames how future examples might function—whether isolated in a field, multiplied across a surface, or nested within a figure—as signs of protective vigilance that easily slide, in modern contexts, into the pressures of surveillance.

At the opposite pole of this watchful omnivision lie motifs of withheld or interiorized seeing. Closed eyes signify “sleep, inner vision, privacy,” redirecting attention away from external spectacle. Klimt’s Girlfriends (Water Serpents I) exemplifies this turn inward. The two nudes, their lids gently shut, drift in a jeweled field where bodies, ornament, and water interpenetrate. Here the absence of outward gaze withdraws the pair from the viewer’s consumption: desire is turned inward, sealed by “closed eyes, interlaced arms, and hair that streams like currents.” The self-contained circuit of touch and repose is intensified, paradoxically, by a watchful other—“a rounded fish at lower right” whose fixed, circular eye functions as sentinel. Within a single composition, then, Klimt juxtaposes interiority (the women’s shut lids) and external vigilance (the fish’s unblinking eye), staging an ecology of gazes that surround but do not yield up the scene’s intimate secrecy.

The same interplay of interior and exterior vision structures Klimt’s portrait Fritza Riedler, though here the terms shift toward social identity. The sitter’s individualized face—meticulously rendered, with “precise blush along the cheekbones” and concentrated color in the lips—emerges from an environment that pressures her into ornamental pattern. Crucial to this pressure are the “almond-shaped ‘eyes’” that punctuate the chair’s upholstery. These are not literal organs but ornamental eyes, a kind of applied gaze that “crowns and cages” Fritza within a field of societal scrutiny. Iconographically, such chair-eyes align with amuletic and apotropaic traditions: pattern becomes a mesh of watchers. Semiotic emphasis falls on the way these decorative eyes stand in for the gaze of society, transforming bourgeois portraiture into a secular icon of visibility itself. The sitter’s own gaze is steadied yet reserved, while the furniture around her looks back; individuality is staged as something negotiated under constant, patterned observation.

A related but more abstract system of ocular symbols structures Klimt’s Expectation (Dancer) and Knight (Part 9). In Expectation, the dancer’s psychology is literally clothed in eyes: her “mosaic robe of triangles and watchful eyes” reads as both armor and sensorium. The embedded eyes “multiply across the garment and in the surrounding arabesques,” converting the Tree of Life’s coils into a field of vigilance. Anticipation becomes a visual condition—“a mode of heightened perception as well as longing”—inscribed in the costume’s surface. In Knight (Part 9), by contrast, vigilance is depersonalized into geometry. “Concentric-ring circles” and alternating ovals and triangles flank a rectilinear standard, functioning as “eyes, studs, and shields” at once. Their definition as “watchfulness and armor-like rivets” underlines a key modern turn: ocular motifs no longer belong exclusively to faces; they migrate into pattern and heraldry to signify an ethical program—here, chivalric guardianship—without depicting an actual observing subject.

If Klimt’s ocular ornaments externalize psychic and ethical watchfulness, Manet and Modigliani work the opposite direction, using the eye to concentrate inward life. In Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, the “deeply black eyes” form the painting’s constructed focal point. Curators note that the sitter’s true green eyes are here pushed toward inky black “for effect,” an intentional intensification that makes the gaze read with unusual force against the symphony of blacks. Semiologically, these eyes are less descriptive than emphatic; by muting internal highlights, Manet converts them into almost abstract nodes of attention. The portrait’s psychological charge is lodged in this dark concentration, which holds the viewer in a silent, ambiguous exchange—neither fully confrontational nor evasive, but acutely aware of being seen and seeing.

Modigliani’s Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) turns on a subtler variation of the same problem. His almond eyes are typically rendered without pupils, becoming “mask-like eyes that reject literal description,” signaling an inward, unreadable subjectivity. In this late portrait, however, “the subtly indicated pupils—rare in many Modigliani portraits—sharpen her psychological immediacy.” Against the flattened terracotta ground and stylized elongations of neck and nose, the faintly marked pupils puncture the mask, granting Jeanne a “psychological immediacy amid the flattened field.” The effect aligns with the definition of “almond eyes with visible pupils” as “psychological immediacy and subjectivity breaking through a stylized mask”: the tiniest inscription within the iris reopens the question of interior life within an otherwise hieratic system of form.

Some works in the collection radicalize the eye’s symbolic function by dislodging it altogether from naturalistic portraiture. In Basquiat’s Dustheads, eyes become targets: “concentric eyes” on the right-hand figure, and “turquoise concentric eyes” on the hot-red body, are coded in the entry as signs of “hyperarousal/altered perception; eyes as sensors locked in an overstimulated state.” These target-eyes participate in a modern iconography of intoxication and urban sensory overload. Stripped of eyelashes, lids, and realistic modeling, they become instruments—raw sensors or sights—rather than psychological windows. Semiotic emphasis shifts from who is looking to what kind of perception is at stake: here, chemically altered, manic, and nocturnal. Their kinship to Klimt’s concentric-ring circles is formal, but their meaning is dramatically recoded from ethical guardianship to survival amid toxic ecstasy.

Across these examples, the gaze category charts several intertwined evolutions. First, the locus of the eye migrates: from being anchored in the face (Berthe Morisot, Jeanne Hébuterne) to being diffused across ornament and environment (Fritza Riedler, Expectation, Knight), and finally to being abstracted into technological or hallucinatory sensors (Dustheads). Second, the valence of watchfulness shifts: amuletic and chivalric vigilance slide into social surveillance and psychic exposure, while closed or pupil-less eyes reclaim zones of privacy and inner life. Third, the very legibility of the gaze becomes unstable. Where early modern portraits often rely on direct, readable eyes to seal a social contract with the viewer, the modern and contemporary works here repeatedly trouble that contract through masks, ornamental displacement, and altered perception.

The history of gaze symbolism traced by these works is thus not a linear story from sacred to secular, but a series of recalibrations. The eye’s ancient roles—guardian, judge, conduit of the soul—persist, but they are folded into new regimes of looking shaped by photography, urban spectacle, psychiatry, and mass media. Whether in Klimt’s ornamental surveillance, Manet’s intensified black irises, Modigliani’s pierced masks, or Basquiat’s target-like sensors, the gaze remains a privileged site where art thinks through what it means to be seen and to see under changing historical conditions.