Eye Contact
Figures who look straight out of the picture and meet the viewer's gaze.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
A direct gaze turns a picture into an encounter. The sitter seems to notice us, which can read as welcome, challenge, seduction or judgement. The mummy portraits of Roman Egypt, from the 1st to 3rd centuries, already meet the living with wide eyes. Jan van Eyck's Portrait of a Man (1433), probably a self-portrait, fixes the viewer from beneath a red turban, and Albrecht Dürer's frontal Self-Portrait (1500) echoes images of Christ.
The look can also unsettle. Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) caused a scandal partly because the nude returns the viewer's stare as if assessing a client, and the sitter in Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) turns over her shoulder with parted lips. Rineke Dijkstra photographs teenagers and new mothers holding wary, level looks, and Marina Abramović made the exchange itself the work in The Artist Is Present (2010), sitting silently opposite visitors one by one.
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