BANKSY // You Have Beautiful Eyes, 2005

  • Banksy’s 2005 You Have Beautiful Eyes graffiti slogan contrasts kindness with surveillance tension.
    Banksy, You Have Beautiful Eyes, 2005.
    Original work missing. Medium and dimensions unknown.
    © Banksy.
    You Have Beautiful Eyes (2005) is a classic example of Banksy’s approach to art history and institutional critique. Taking a version of The Fair Persian (1916) by British academic painter William Clarke Wontner, Banksy retains the original’s neoclassical composition with silken drapery, romantic lighting, and the idealised beauty of its sitter. But his intervention is simple and startling: a heavy-duty gas mask now obscures the woman’s face, transforming her from a passive object of beauty into a haunting symbol of danger, survival, and toxic modernity.
     
    Exhibited covertly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in March 2005, this unauthorised placement was part of Banksy’s legendary series of guerrilla gallery pranks. With biting irony, You Have Beautiful Eyes questions not only the romanticised gaze of classical portraiture but also the art world’s role in upholding outmoded ideals. 

     

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  • “When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”

    – Banksy

    Created in 2005, You Have Beautiful Eyes reworks William Clarke Wontner’s The Fair Persian (1916) by adding a heavy-duty gas mask to the sitter’s face. The neoclassical style of the original, with its refined fabrics and idealised features, clashes with the brutal imagery of the mask. First exhibited secretly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the piece epitomises Banksy’s guerrilla interventions and his satirical critique of art history and institutional authority.