Art by René Magritte

Magritte's paintings work like deadpan visual jokes with real philosophical weight behind them: a pipe labeled, in French, "this is not a pipe" (correct, technically, since it's only a painting of one); a man in a bowler hat with an apple hovering in front of his face; ordinary objects rendered at impossible scale or in impossible combinations, all painted in a flat, almost commercial-illustration style rather than anything dreamlike or gestural. For stretches of his career, short on money, he actually worked in wallpaper design and advertising, a background that may explain why his surrealism looks so clean and legible compared to the more chaotic, automatic-drawing style other Surrealists favored.