Gaze

Within art history, the gaze has never been a neutral conduit of vision; it is a coded site where power, desire, belief, and self-consciousness crystallize. From religious icons that posit a reciprocal, judging eye to modern portraits that dramatize the instability of looking, ocular motifs and directed gazes organize the relation between image and beholder. The symbols gathered under this category—ranging from almond-shaped eyes drained of pupils to confrontational stares, amorphous sfumato, and literal spectators within the depicted scene—chart a shift from transcendent watching to worldly surveillance and finally to reflexive, psychological seeing. They function both semiotically, as repeatable signs whose meaning can be learned, and iconographically, as motifs embedded in specific narratives and pictorial traditions.

At one pole stand motifs that literalize vigilance and oversight. Klimt’s Expectation (Dancer) offers a concentrated instance in the robe “armored” with eye-like ornaments. These embedded eyes and the surrounding concentric-ring circles operate semiotically as a field of watchfulness. They echo, in abstracted form, the “concentric-ring circles (‘eyes’/studs)” and related “concentric target/disks” described in the symbolism glossary: repeated ocular forms that can read simultaneously as eyes and as rivets or studs. In their iconographic context—the Tree of Life frieze and its gold-clad, ritual space—these eyes do not simply decorate; they signal a heightened state of alertness in which expectation is figured as an almost cosmological vigilance. The woman’s intent profile gaze, directed into the spiral-thick space ahead, fuses with the robe’s multiplied eyes to construct a total environment of perception: her body is both seeing and seen, a sensor among other sensors.

This ornamental vigilance recurs in Klimt’s Girlfriends (Water Serpents I), where “eye-shaped ovals/scales” and the rounded, watchful fish punctuate the drifting female bodies. The fish’s fixed circular eye functions iconographically as a sentinel at the edge of an otherwise secret scene of intertwined nudes with closed eyes. Semiotically, it mirrors the role of the all-seeing eye: a node of concentrated awareness that guarantees the scene’s visibility to some other presence, even as the lovers themselves remain inwardly turned. Klimt’s decorative eyes thus oscillate between apotropaic “Eyes of Horus” traditions—protective, healing vision—and a more modern, eroticized surveillance in which ornamental vision surrounds and frames intimate bodies.

The category also encompasses modern strategies that internalize the gaze, turning literal eyes into symbols of psychological depth or opacity. Modigliani’s Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) is paradigmatic. His almond-shaped eyes, when left without pupils in other works, are famously read as “mask-like eyes that reject literal description, signaling inwardness and mystery.” Here, however, the “almond eyes with visible pupils” puncture that mask, admitting a measured psychological immediacy. Semiotically, the tiny pupils operate as minimal but decisive marks that shift the head from archetype to subject. The sitter’s direct yet gentle gaze, stabilized by the elongated neck and terracotta field, presents an interior life that is accessible but guarded; it oscillates between the withheld, pupilless mask and the confronting eye/gaze associated with defiance and accusation. The red scarf at the throat further anchors this gaze, so that looking becomes bound to breath and voice: seeing and speaking are coiled together at the juncture of the self.

Édouard Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets radicalizes another aspect of ocular symbolism: the eye as a constructed, emphatic focus point. The “deeply black eyes” are not naturalistic—the Musée d’Orsay notes their deliberate exaggeration—but function semiotically as dark anchors within a symphony of blacks. Their inky tonality intensifies the sitter’s “direct, steady gaze,” aligning with the entry’s emphasis on self-scrutiny and the craft of seeing. In iconographic terms, Morisot’s role as a painter inflects this gaze: she is not merely a model but a seeing subject, her black eyes a metonym for artistic vision itself. Manet’s decision to homogenize costume into near-abstract darkness further isolates the eyes as the composition’s semantic core: they hold the portrait’s tension between intimacy and distance, affection and reserve, as signaled by the discreet knot of violets.

If Manet and Modigliani probe subjective interiority, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon weaponizes the gaze as social and erotic confrontation. The “confrontational gaze/frontality” of three central figures and the mask-like, almond eyes of the two right-hand women enact what the glossary calls a “direct gaze of the nude” that “challenges passive, idealized classical nudity.” Semiotically, the direct stare collapses the classical hierarchy in which the female body is offered to an invisible viewer; instead, the women look back, indicting the beholder as participant in the brothel economy the painting exposes. The stylized, mask-like eyes—stripped of individualized softness—link to ethnographic and ritual masks, importing a non-Western visual vocabulary that both shields and hardens their faces. Iconographically, this move recasts the brothel not as anecdote but as a stage for modernity’s fractured, dangerous acts of looking: desire here is laced with threat, as the jagged still life below mirrors the sharpness of their gaze.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads extends the history of the gaze into the terrain of altered perception. The “concentric ‘target’ eyes” on the electrified, mask-like figures literalize hyperarousal; they are not eyes that see calmly, but eyes as sensors locked in overstimulated states. Semiotically, they merge the all-seeing eye with the technological crosshairs of modern targeting, embedding surveillance within the very physiology of the figures. The golden halo over one head complicates this further, affiliating the frantic gaze with the sanctifying motifs of earlier religious art. Iconographically, in the context of 1980s New York and the title’s reference to PCP users, these target-eyes register the psychic cost of urban visibility: to be “seen” as a dusthead is to be fixed in the crosshairs of policing, stigma, and myth. Basquiat thus retools the gaze as both symptom and accusation—a mark of survival within an environment of hostile watching.

Across these examples, intermediating gazes and halos modulate the relationship between image and viewer. In Klimt’s Fritza Riedler, the chair back patterned with “almond-shaped eyes” and the arched, window-like forms behind her head echo the function of a “circular halo/fan” in Emilie Flöge: they create an aura of iconic presence. Yet the ornamental eyes in Riedler’s chair also hint at the “gaze of society,” an undercurrent of social surveillance that frames her bourgeois poise and “Folded Hands and Upright Posture.” The sitter is elevated and constrained at once—her direct, composed look negotiated through a lattice of watching motifs. In Flöge’s portrait, by contrast, the halo-like fan behind the head underscores a self-fashioned modern identity; her unflinching gaze and hand-on-hip stance occupy that iconic circle with confident agency rather than submission.

Taken together, these works chart a historical evolution in the symbolism of the gaze. Pre-modern all-seeing and amuletic eyes, oriented toward cosmic order and protection, are reconfigured by Klimt into ornamental fields of erotic vigilance and secular guardianship. The mask-like, pupilless eyes associated with inward mystery in Modigliani’s vocabulary coexist, in the same period, with the confrontational, accusatory stares of Manet’s and Picasso’s modern women. By the late twentieth century, Basquiat’s target-eyes bear the imprint of policing, addiction, and media optics, marking a world in which to see and to be seen are inseparable from systems of control. Throughout, artists exploit the semiotic pliability of eyes and gazes—direct, averted, multiplied, or drained of detail—to stage the ethics and dangers of looking, turning the gaze itself into one of modern art’s most charged symbolic arenas.