d a thigh can be seen. The pachyderm's trunk wields a brush that paints overlapping lines on a canvas, thus representing the image of a painter's unconscious painting a picture. With this painting, Ernst illustrated the challenge of artists who seek to work with the monsters (as represented by the pachyderm in the painting) that dwell in the realm of their unconsciousness, along with the fragments of images collected by the painters in his daily life (as represented by the bird heads and the breast), to realize their inner realities in their artwork (Passeron, 1975). Nonetheless, the resultant painting with overlapping lines captures the inadequacy of artists' attempt to translate their unconscious reality onto the canvas. This unceasing quest to recreate the unconscious thus represents the key characteristic of surrealist art.
In order to overcome this problem, surrealist artists strove to obliterate the existence of the painters in order to tap into a higher reality. According to Max Ernst, the creation of paintings based on objective chance
...