I wonder that myself, since I'm such case.

But yeah, he went too pop. Pity.

I've seen similar paintings, but not that particular one. Does it reflect an actual event, or was this guy a major stoner?

What's the freakiest painting you've seen that was made before the 20th century?

Admiring the primitive mystery suggested by Gauguin's work in Tahiti, the Surrealists wanted an art to wonder and marvel at, not an art of reason and balance but something miraculous and mystical. They were great collectors of the products of 'primitive' cultures such as Oceanic sculpture. (The Fauves and the Cubists had already 'discovered' African sculpture.) In European painting they looked behind the classical tradition for obsessions and eccentricities of vision and imagination: for example, the views of hell with its hybrid monsters by Hieronymous Bosch (1453-1516); the bizarre results of the obsession of Paolo Uccello (1396/7-1475) with perspective; the fantastic and menacing prisons of Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778), nightmares of Henri Fuseli (1741-1825) and the black period of Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). In the nineteenth century, they found Impressionism too naturalistic, too rational. They preferred Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist dreamlike images. Scorning fashion, Breton was a devotee of the visionary paintings of Gustave Moreau (1828-1898), and at a time when art nouveau was disregarded by the cognoscenti, the Surrealists marveled at its wrought iron plants as though the transformation of natural organic forms into metal was a sort of alchemy. They found Cubism, too rational, too logical (although an exception was made for Picasso's totemic proto Cubist painting Les demoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso himself was also a special case, being held in awe as a phenomenon and a sort of unordained priest of Surrealism.) The Surrealists preferred the 'primitive' vision of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). They rejected Futurism, preferring the Metaphysical painters, especially the haunting enigmas of Giorgio de Chirico (b 1888).