This narrative work formally allies two recurring subjects in Peter Besharo’s visual vocabulary: a winged angel in a tarboosh and a helmeted space figure in liturgical vestments. Radiant light, enhanced by a flame and a rising sun emerging from a blue brick structure, illuminates the main figures. Commanding the scene from above are two all-seeing eyes, one of which features two irises and pupils. A deeply saturated dark-red background applied with a scumbling technique accentuates the intensity of the lighted areas, as do the vigorous brushstrokes emanating from the figures. The spatial composition is ambiguous and mysterious—the figures seem to be both inside and outside the stagelike arched red area.

Besharo, who painted approximately seventy visionary landscapes during his career, was a Syrian-Lebanese immigrant who came to America around 1910; by 1913 he was peddling dry goods at mining camps around Leechburg, Pennsylvania, and by 1923 he was supporting himself as a housepainter. He lived in a room at the Penn-Lee Hotel in Leechburg and rented studio space around the corner. Based on his paintings, it appears Besharo had anti-Zionist feelings, possibly brought to the fore after the state of Israel was established in 1948. He was the town’s lone Christian Maronite, and he worshipped at St. Catherine Roman Catholic Church; he fervently believed that sympathetic church leaders could bring about universal peace.

The Double All-Seeing Eye presents a somewhat ambiguous scene of accord, however. The angel, surrounded by a vibrant aura, holds his hands out to the cleric, whose face is obscured by his helmet. Above the cleric’s head is a red question mark, an uncertainty repeated to the right. A third figure at the lower left—very small, hands bound, and also outfitted in a space helmet—beams light rays at the angel. The angel stands upon a carpet decorated with the Star of David—perhaps a symbol of Israel’s annihilation. Besharo’s fascination with outer space is rendered both violently and peacefully. Since the late nineteenth century, science fiction has featured aliens both menacing and godlike. The latter have offered utopian possibilities, an idea also explored in comic strips of the 1930s and cinema of the 1950s and 1960s through the present day. Besharo’s imagination was certainly richly stoked by the space exploration and the Cold War very much in the news when this painting likely was executed.

Lee Kogan, "The Double All-Seeing Eye," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 390.