Which surrealist artist painted 'The Eye of Silence'?

Max Ernst painted The Eye of Silence.

Ernst created The Eye of Silence in 1943–44, during the period when his Surrealist landscapes often turned organic textures and geological forms into dreamlike environments. The painting is an oil on canvas and presents a strange landscape in which rock, vegetation, animal-like shapes, and architectural suggestions appear to merge.

To build its surface, Ernst used decalcomania, a technique in which paint is pressed against another surface and then pulled away. The resulting textures are partly accidental. Ernst reworked those marks until they suggested a primordial world, allowing chance patterns to guide the imagination without fully determining the final image.

Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta are reasonable distractors because both made important Surrealist landscapes and invented environments. Joan Miró is also associated with biomorphic imagery. The canonical attribution, however, is Ernst’s: The Eye of Silence is specifically identified as his 1943–44 painting.

The work is held by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. Its imagery later attracted literary and science-fiction associations, including influence on J. G. Ballard.