“There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” said Magritte. Magritte commented on the work, noting that the main theme is that human nature is to desire to see that which is hidden: His eyes are just barely visible over the edge of the apple and slightly reveals a morose expression. The man is shown standing in front of a wall overlooking the sea in the background. Magritte painted the work in 1946 as a self-portrait that features a relatively simple depiction of a man wearing a suit and bowler hat with an oddly placed green apple in front of his face. One of the most iconic surrealist paintings ever created is René Magritte’s work titled The Son of Man. The general public has often struggled with the meaning of the image as too did did Dali himself to a certain extent. It was painted at a time when Dali was experimenting heavily with self-induced hallucinations as a means to explore ‘subconscious art’ or as the artist referred to it as his ‘paranoiac-critical method’. Dali would use ants to symbolize decay many times in his work. In the lower left corer of the painting there is an orange pocket watch that is covered in ants. The watches although made from hard metal are presented in a soft malleable form which epitomized Dalí’s theory of “softness” and “hardness” and were said to represent the surrealist perception of a “Camembert melting in the sun”. The center “figure” has no exact form or composition and yet it appears to be face which looks like a vague profile of Dali’s own face draped in a melting watch.Īlso Read: Salvador Dali Most Famous Paintings It is often referred to as “The Melting Clocks” or “The Melting Watches”.

Painted by the one of the most controversial surrealist artists of all, Salvador Dali in 1931, it was anonymously donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it has remained in their collection ever since.

The Persistence of Memory is easily the most famous surrealist painting ever produced, as an image it has been reproduced millions of times on prints, posters, and t-shirts.

Miro painting