Salvador Dali

• Dali's paintings combine a rigorous attention to detail along with imagery that displays his investigation of the subconscious mind. Dali was a student of the theories of Freud and used these theories to inspire the symbolic imagery of his paintings. His "The Persistence of Memory," painted in 1931, shows three clocks that appear to be draped or melted across a ledge, a bare tree and part of a face. Another watch is closed and has ants running across it. The landscape of the painting is still. This painting has been interpreted using dream symbolism, and Dali himself referred to all of his paintings as "hand painted dream photographs."
  
  

Rene Magritte

• Magritte's surrealistic paintings were meant to focus the viewer's attention on the fact that even the most realistically rendered object in a painting is never actually that object itself. He painted a series of works that he termed "Ceci n'est pas" paintings. These works, translated to "This is not" in English, emphasized his desire to remind the viewer that they are looking at paint on a canvas. His painting "The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)" shows a simply rendered pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." written beneath. The surrealism here is not it the wild incongruence of juxtaposed images, but rather in the subversion of the viewer's expectation that the image on the canvas is meant to be viewed as if it was the real thing.
  
  

Joan Miro

• Though most of Miro's paintings are not literal representations of persons, places or things, he is considered a surrealist because he allowed his subconscious to spontaneously guide him as he painted and intended his work to convey symbolic significance. Miro himself said that, though he often painted abstract images, for him "a form is. . . always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake." His insistence on allowing his painted images to emerge freely as he painted, allowing any shape or form to stand for a concrete person, object or animal, is represented in his 1935 work "Animated Forms."
  
  

Max Ernst

• Max Ernst was a fervent believer in allowing his subconscious to freely influence the subject matter of his work. He was influenced by childhood dreams and nightmares, including these potent images in his work. Common subjects that held symbolic significance for Ernst included birds and forests. He also used Freudian symbolism and mythological images in his paintings. His 1937 work "The Fireside Angel" depicts a bird-like creature that recalls a mythological animal such as the gryphon. A closer inspection of the creature, however, reveals that its body is composed of a mixture suggestive colors and shapes, odd small creatures and human body parts.