The Eye, 1945 by Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali's The Eye (1945) is a great piece of art that summarizes how we perceive our reality and amazingly embody our experience. The eye is part of paintings made by Salvador Dali for the dream sequences of the film Spellbound starring Ingrid Bergman and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The painting represents one of the dreams that the psychiatrist (Ingrid Bergman in the movie) was analyzing for her patients.

Even run-of-the-mill Dali can sometimes astound - like The Eye, one of five paintings connected with his work on the dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound. No foundation-shaking optical trickery here. Instead, a glassy, weeping eye, suspended in mid-air over a sky like a bruise. It is reminiscent of the eye-slitting scene in Un Chien Andalou, the 1928 film Dali made with Bunuel. Most of all, it underlines that Dali is all about looking: in the early days, work that had to be looked at, and in the later years, work that begged and bullied to be.

Here, Salvador Dali created, what Freud said, the eyes of a "candid fanatic".