I think a certain amount of sub-Berger can be talked about this, but the portraits aren't randomly selected: the artist has chosen a certain type of portrait with a certain type of sitter to make a point which must have occurred to most people who've ever been in an art gallery. Religious art apart from pictures of the Virgin -- a good source of older, crosser-looking women with faces in action rather than repose -- is underrepresented. The eyes are creepily static, but I'd be wary of ascribing that to the "male gaze" until I'd seen a control: a similar thing done with portraits of men, for example (not that a possessive gaze can't operate on men's bodies, but I don't think we can gender it so easily if that is the case). I suspect the eyes stay where they are because everybody's eyes are roughly the same place in their heads, so there are only a limited number of things you can do with eyes in a figural portrait (the artist has selected their Cubists and other moderns very carefully: a more radical Picasso, for example, would have upset things rather).
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