1 St. Anthony in Hollywood

Fueled by Gustave Flaubert’s dramatic novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine (published in its final form in 1874), imagery of demonic temptations became highly fashionable by the end of the nineteenth century. Alongside the theme of the femme fatale, St. Anthony was abundant in popular culture as well as in post-impressionist and symbolist art.⁷ The Saint also continued to inspire German expressionist and post-expressionist painters such as Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix in the first half of the twentieth century.⁸ Even though surrealism was saturated with fin de siècle culture, Anthony appeared late and serendipitously in surrealist art. Perhaps the anticlerical stance of surrealism made the subject unattractive. Besides, how could any modern artist compete with the shocking and bizarre imagery of the subject composed by early modern painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald—artists that the surrealists adored early on?⁹

Such difficulties may explain why the first and most important surrealist paintings of Anthony came to fruition through external impulses. All of them date from after World War II and were tied to a unique event: an international art competition held in 1945/46 for the film The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), a Hollywood adaption of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885) directed by the sophisticated American filmmaker Albert Lewin.¹⁰ Lewin, who loved art-historical references and was himself a keen collector of non-Western and avant-garde art,¹¹ commissioned several artists committed to surrealism or sympathetic to ‘fantastic’ art. He asked them to paint a version of the Temptations of St. Anthony for the scenography of his film and gathered a prominent jury to select the ‘best’ painted version of the Saint, which would then be displayed at a crucial moment in the film.¹² In a spectacular scene, the chosen painting was filmed in technicolor, starkly disrupting the otherwise black-and-white film. Lewin had already deployed a similar trick in his previous films The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which featured color shots of paintings.¹³ Building on this visual strategy, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami became a stage for a surreal Saint: St. Anthony entered surrealism via Hollywood.

View Full Size

Figure 1

Unknown photographer: The jury (left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Sidney Janis)

Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 2026; 10.1163/25896377-tat00001

Source: American Federation of Arts (1947: 2). Fair Use

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Twelve artists were invited to enter the contest: Max Ernst, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, Eugene Berman, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Louis Guglielmi, Horace Pippin, Stanley Spencer, Dorothea Tanning, Abraham Rattner, and Leonor Fini (who did not submit in time). Many of the artists lived in America; some were US citizens, while others were European émigrés living in the United States or Mexico. The jury consisted of influential figures from the American art world, including Marcel Duchamp; Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founder of the MoMA; and the art collector Sidney Janis, who worked for the board of the same museum and was to open his own gallery in New York in 1948 (fig. 1). All the artists received a fee of $ 500 and their works were shown in an exhibition that toured the United States and Europe. The event was accompanied by a catalogue from the American Federation of Arts (1947) containing statements from the film’s director, the jury, and the artists. In addition, the winner of the competition was to receive an award of $ 2500, and the winning piece was featured in the movie. The competition was a publicity stunt for both the film and the artists. At the same time, the original revolutionary and political impulses of the surrealist movement were reduced to a fashionable showpiece embedded within show business and consumerism.¹⁴ Lewin himself profited from the growing popularity of surrealism in fashion and media. For example, just before Lewin’s film was released, Alfred Hitchcock had collaborated with Dalí on a dream sequence in his psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945).¹⁵ Lewin’s film was further proof of the arrival of European surrealism in the American mainstream.

According to the jury, the final decision was difficult. Duchamp even expressed his doubts in his short statement for the catalogue, noting: “Jurors are always apt to be wrong” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 3).¹⁶ Nonetheless, Ernst was awarded first place, closely followed by Albright and Berman. The fee and the prize money supported Ernst’s and Tanning’s move to Sedona in 1946. After the competition, the artist couple withdrew to the desert town and fashioned themselves as hermits—or shamans—amid the red rocks of Arizona.¹⁷ In sharp contrast, Lewin’s film transposed the temptations from the desert to the metropolis, focusing on the temptations of modern life in Paris. Ernst’s painting was a highlight of the film. Within the filmic narration, the painting is shown at the soirée of a bourgeois family. The protagonist of the film, the ruthless womanizer and social climber George Duroy, alias Bel-Ami, is first shown the painting by the young daughter of the house, Suzanne Walter, his future fiancée. Suzanne leads George into the salon where the painting is hanging (fig. 2): First, we see the panel from the back surrounded by a strange construction of lightbulbs. Then we see George staring at the painting and Suzanne staring at George before the painting is revealed to the camera in a dazzling full-screen color shot. The protagonists are mesmerized by the tormenting temptations of the Saint, which appear in a full screenshot lasting nearly 10 seconds. After the scene, Bel-Ami sighs an emphatic “yes” before regaining control and continuing to chat. He tries to hide a disturbing revelation: his instantaneous identification with Anthony.

View Full Size

Figure 2

Bel Ami (George Sanders) and Suzanne Walter (Susan Douglas Rubeš) look at Max Ernst’s painting. Screenshots from the film: The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), directed by Albert Lewin and produced by David L. Loew, United States, 1947, Fair Use Film Still

Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 2026; 10.1163/25896377-tat00001

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

This mise-en-scène breaks the illusion of the narration of the film and restores the surrealist poetics of visual shock. The initial shock, which gradually lost its power in the face of World War II and the spread of mass media, is regained through a simple trick: the sudden silence, the contrast of color, and the anachronistic setting. In this way, a rather conventional period film sends Ernst’s painting back into the past like a ‘time machine’, simulating the amazement that the first artworks of the surrealists must have provoked more than 20 years earlier, in the interwar period. Within the narration, the effect of the painting is partly explained by its ‘electric illumination’ framing the panel and anticipating the visual power of technicolor. The electrified Saint intrudes on the film’s screen from a different time and space.

The whole scene significantly deviates from its literary model: In Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the corresponding painting did not represent the “Temptations of St. Anthony” but “Christ Walking on the Waters.” Suzanne’s mother, Madame Walter, who had an affair with George, is obsessed with the painted figure of Christ miraculously resembling her lover (1975: 357 ff.).¹⁸ Owing to the religious censorship in American film at the time, Lewin had to replace Christ with an analogous subject.¹⁹ This replacement sheds new light on the protagonist from both the novel and the film. Whereas in Maupassant’s account, George’s seductive power and social success are compared with Christ’s walking on the water, in the film, Madame Walter and George associate their struggles with the Temptations of St. Anthony. The painting functions as a psychological mirror of their private obsessions, their sense of guilt—their ‘inner’ demons. Lewin reduced the blasphemy of the scene, the potential sexual attraction to Jesus, in favor of a more Hollywoodesque “dramatization of the struggle of good and evil”, as he stated in the catalogue (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 5). At the same time, the scene visualizes a sentence uttered by Bel-Ami in the novel, who links his resistance with the temptation of Anthony when he falsely promises: “I placed myself under the protection of St. Anthony, patron-saint of temptations” (Maupassant, 1975: 238). Yet, in the film, this protection turns into a curse. Perverting Bel-Ami’s statement, Lewin substantiated an intertextual link between Maupassant and his literary model Flaubert, whom Maupassant adored.²⁰ The iconographic substitution took place on all levels—strategically, psychologically, intertextually—a clever move. Nevertheless, the film director knew that the artworks he commissioned would outshine his film: “I felt that The Private Affairs of Bel Ami had become the occasion of an important event in the art world, an event that might well be remembered when my movie was forgotten” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 6). Lewin was right: Today his film is less well known than the paintings he commissioned.

2 Max Ernst’s Demons

Within the film, the short glimpse of Ernst’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) does not allow for the appreciation of details. The painting—now located in the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg—is highly complex (fig. 3): In the foreground, a bearded man, Anthony, collapses under the attacks of his demons. His upright figure is broken and his contorted body spans like a bridge over a stretch of water. Jagged rocks enclose the scene like a stage and in the middle ground, a bizarre island rises from the lake. In the background, yellowish storm clouds cover the sky from the left side. The landscape bears no apparent traces of human civilization. The inorganic bedrock morphs into organic textures that are inhabited by zoomorphic monsters. Their bodies are hybrid, consisting of fragments of birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and insects, yet they still bear a few human traits. The Saint has been toppled by the demonic powers of nature and recent history. He is on the verge of becoming non-human.²¹ The whole landscape resembles related apocalyptic scenes that Ernst painted in the 1940s—for example, Europe after the Rain II (1940–1942) or The Eye of Silence (1943–1944). Such post-catastrophic visions reflect the devastation of the war.²² Moreover, they are indebted to Ernst’s fascination with prehistoric landscapes, which pervaded his early work and most notably his essential graphic cycle Histoire naturelle (1925–1926). Since the 1920s the artist had been obsessed with a form of pre- and simultaneously post-human petrified nature haunted by phantoms and revived through artistic imagination.²³

However, the demonic creatures animating the deserted landscape of Ernst’s Temptation of St. Anthony do not just obey the (un)conscious personal imagination of the artist or spectator. Above all, they follow iconographic patterns signaling a return to tradition: On the one hand, Ernst’s demons continue—as Barr noted—the medieval and early modern depiction of hybrid monsters. On the other hand, they recall the throng of mythical and biological creatures described in Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, a book that was itself inspired by early modern visual art.²⁴ In the last chapter of his text, Flaubert depicts Anthony encircled by a multitude of monsters:

View Full Size

Figure 3

Max Ernst, The Temptations of St. Anthony, Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, 1947

Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 2026; 10.1163/25896377-tat00001

Source: Westheider and Philipp (2008: 177). Fair Use

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Eyeballs are everywhere flaming, and mouths roaring; there are bulging breasts, elongated claws, gnashing teeth, the smack of flesh on flesh. Some give birth, others copulate, or in a single mouthful eat each other up. Stifled by their numbers, multiplying on contact, they crawl over one another—and they all heave around Anthony […]. Across his calves he feels the trails of snail, on his hands the chill of vipers; and spiders spinning their webs enclose him in their mesh.

Flaubert, 1980: 230

Several elements of this scene reappear in Ernst’s painting: the dazzling agglomeration of eyeballs, the voracious claws and teeth, monsters in the mouths of other monsters, the snake, a spider, and the spiderweb. More importantly, the distinctions between different life forms and between life and dead matter blur. This lack of distinction is explicitly stressed in Flaubert’s novel: “Vegetable and animal can now no longer be distinguished. […] And then the plants become confused with the rocks” (231). It is very likely that Ernst knew Flaubert’s Tentation. Yet, even if he did not have this book in mind while working on his Temptation, both accounts of the Saint culminate in the confusion of the organic and inorganic.

Following traditional artistic and literary representations, Anthony’s trials merge with demonic torture in Ernst’s account. Physical pain is an integral step in the dramaturgy of spiritual temptations.²⁵ For Ernst, the aggressions mainly focus on two parts of the body: the abdomen and mouth of the hermit. The demons infiltrate the process of ingestion and digestion, the in-and-out cycle of absorption and excretion. Simultaneously, they attack the capacity for biological and linguistic reproduction, transforming the work into an expression of speechlessness.²⁶ This last aspect is reinforced in the film when the silence of Bel-Ami in front of the picture mirrors the mute Saint. After all, the speechlessness in the picture is not silence, but a cry of pain. Ernst emphasized this when he described his painting in the catalogue in one sentence: “Shrieking for help and light across the stagnant water of his dark sick soul, St. Anthony receives as an answer the echo of his fear: the laughter of the monsters created by his visions” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 9). One might add that Anthony is shrieking for the Word of God since the Holy Scriptures played a crucial role in the iconography of the Saint—whether in the form of the Bible, inscriptions, or the strange figure of reading demons.²⁷ Yet the Scriptures seem absent in Ernst’s Temptation. The visual shock outweighs the spiritual dimension. The demons are no longer an unintentional theological echo of biblical readings; rather, they are a pictorial echo—a subjective vision—of the fears provoked by the monstrosities of recent history that fill the void of the absence of Scripture. The Saint’s speech and the speech of the redemptive Gospel turn into a cry of despair.

While pain dominates the foreground of the painting, desire hides in the middle ground: In the center, the gaze falls on the figure of a faceless woman emerging from the shape of a rock. The woman fights against strands of petrified vegetation entwining her naked body like the monstrous snakes that killed Laocoön and his children. On the top of the rock, a mysterious male figure emerges, apparently a praying monk with hands outstretched to the sky. In many other decalcomania paintings by Ernst, we can observe a couple, perhaps autobiographically recalling Ernst’s and Tanning’s ‘ascetic’ time in the desert. But above the head of the Saint, we see another undressed woman: Her face is veiled, and she is crucified on the top of a long pole looming into the yellow sky. Harriet Janis and her husband Sidney Janis describe these female figures in their commentary for the catalogue respectively as the “theme of sacred and profane love—in the lush center the figure of an earthy temptress; to the right, high on a pedestal, the figure of a woman exalted” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 8). But they do not mention that the woman is crucified. With this important detail, the embodiment of “sacred love” becomes the only reference to the Scriptures, reminding us of the fact that the temptations of the Saint are in their theological essence an imitatio Christi.²⁸ The female figure is most likely a reference to a famous pastel by the Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops, who represented Anthony at the feet of a tempting femme fatale hanging naked on a cross replacing the dead body of Christ.²⁹ Sigmund Freud embraced Rops’s portrayal of the Saint in his study Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva (1907) and understood it as an ideal illustration of the psychological mechanism of the return of the repressed.³⁰ A keen reader of Freud, Ernst must have been aware of this, all the more since the figure of Gradiva became a ‘muse’ for many surrealists.³¹ The temptress must be read as an homage to the founder of psychoanalysis. And since Lewin was interested in psychoanalysis, Freudian motifs could be considered a common bond connecting the artist and the filmmaker. Yet, in the cinematic context, Ernst’s crucified woman symbolizes more than the return of repressed sexuality—she is the return of the imagery of Christ, whose image was banned from the film. The Scriptures, largely expelled by the painting, return in the form of an object of desire.

After all, Ernst’s portrait of Anthony is not only informed by (pre)modern iconography and reading Flaubert and Freud. It is essentially formed by the technique of decalcomania, the production of accidental structures through the transfer of oil-based paint from glass or paper to the canvas. Ernst and other surrealists adopted this technique, which had been rediscovered in the 1930s by the painter Óscar Domínguez as a pictorial analog to automatic writing.³² Decalcomania offered pseudo-organic patterns to the imagination and was, alongside other artistic methods—such as frottage, grattage, and collage—at the very heart of the avant-gardist engagement with chance, combinatory images, and mimetic resemblance. Decalcomania pervades the hidden structure of Ernst’s Temptation, most clearly in the petrified vegetation, the rocks, the cliffs, and the spiderweb. With this effect, Ernst introduces chance into the temptation: The phantasms rise from accidental structures that reflect the imagination of the Saint, the artist, and the spectator. We can already see this prevalence of chance in earlier symbolist representations of Anthony by Gustave Moreau or James Ensor, with which Ernst was most likely familiar.³³ Chance is also highlighted by the Janis couple: “The type of images customarily suggested to and developed by Ernst from the accident of chance are extremely adaptable to the theme and spirit of the St. Anthony legend and make of it a thoroughly contemporary version”; for them, Ernst’s phantasms appear as “fevered imagination” that “has symbolized and externalized the pain of the struggle” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 8). In a similar vein, in his article “Le château étoile” (1936)—which was illustrated by Ernst—André Breton interpreted an amorphous cloud, the surface of a wall or decalcomania as a kind of “screen” on which our unconscious desire appears “written in phosphorescent letters” (1936b: 35).³⁴ From this perspective, the demons become pure psychological projections, the products of a kind of Rorschach test belonging to the “beholder’s share”.³⁵

This interpretation is further supported by Ernst’s comment on the “laughter of the monsters” as well as by the often-quoted autobiographical note from his text “Au-delà de la peinture” (1936). The artist narrates how, as a child, he had an oedipal vision of his father and strange animals emerging from the surface of a fake mahogany piece of furniture. The painted wood becomes a screen of imaginary projections, “[…] calling forth associations of organic forms (menacing eyes, long nose, great head of a bird with thick black hair, etc.)” (Ernst, 1948: 3).³⁶ A little later, Ernst recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s famous advice of methodically seeing resemblances of things in stained walls, moving clouds, smoke, or glowing ashes. Surrealist automatism promises to provoke similar dreamlike visions. In this light, Ernst’s ‘primal scene’ is repeated in the Temptation of St. Anthony. The legendary life of the artist intermingles with the legendary life of the ancient desert Saint—autobiography intersects hagiography. Nonetheless, there is a significant difference: Anthony is not a distant spectator; he is part of the screen where he is being physically tormented. His gaze reaches out to the beholder, which turns him into a subject of identification, as Bel-Ami proves in the film. At the same time, he seems to be in danger of being absorbed in the painting. Whereas Ernst’s demons appear from the panel in statu nascendi, Anthony is in the process of disappearance—in statu decedendi. The distance of the beholder dissolves in the face of the political trauma. The mechanism of psychological projection collapses into a physical absorption that can be described—as I will argue—far from autobiographical readings, as a special kind of spatial experience.

3 Post-Heroism

The Temptations of St. Anthony fit within the surrealist agenda from the 1940s that stressed the urgency of creating legends and myths. With the emigration of many surrealists, the presence of myth in modern society transformed into the task of creating a political and artistic counter-mythology to fascism.³⁷ André Breton proclaimed the “Need for a New Myth” in an article on “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst” for a special issue of the American avant-garde magazine View (1942: 5–9).³⁸ Alfred Barr, an art historian by training, underscored this mythical dimension in his statement as a jury member: “In an age when traditional legends and symbols have almost disappeared from art, the St. Anthony competition seems to me exceptionally significant” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 3). Barr detected traces of the iconography of Martin Schongauer, Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, Jacques Callot, David Teniers, and James Ensor in the contributions. In the case of Ernst’s painting, the recurrence of the iconography of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516) is most prominent.³⁹ Ernst had been familiar with the Isenheim Altarpiece since his youth, long before it became fashionable in avant-garde circles.⁴⁰ By choosing an early modern German painter as the model for his composition, the artist—whose work the Nazis labeled as ‘degenerate’—unmistakably referred to his country of origin and the horrors of fascism. The painful temptation alludes to the monstrous and demonic destruction of the war and Ernst’s emigration.⁴¹

The other participants in the Bel Ami Competition also referred to traditional iconographic antetypes: Details of Tanning’s composition seem to spring directly from the Isenheim Altarpiece.⁴² Carrington followed the example of the portrayal of St. Anthony by Bosch. Dalí’s hallucinatory phantoms were possibly inspired by the Neapolitan baroque painter Salvator Rosa.⁴³ Berman’s version treats the subject in a graphic style that reminds us of Schongauer or Dürer. Most of the contributions exhibited a strong awareness of the history of art and followed the transhistorical concept of the ‘fantastic,’ which Barr had proposed several years beforehand in his seminal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at the MoMA.⁴⁴ This show united dadaism and surrealism under the umbrella term of ‘fantastic art’ against the backdrop of early modern art and included photographic reproductions of the Temptations of St. Anthony by Bosch and his followers as well as the famous print by Schongauer. Within this frame, the demons created for Lewin’s film, not only mix different existing creatures, but they also mix different art historical layers. The theological impotence of the demons to create something ex nihilo reduces their phantasms to a diabolic remix and deformation of divine creation. Just like in the iconographic tradition after Bosch, which eclectically combined elements from the works of the master,⁴⁵ the combinatorics of the demons extend into the surrealist adaptation of this on the level of iconography. The Temptations of St. Anthony invoke an incessant demonic reshaping of tradition.

However, in sharp contrast to the premodern tradition, most of the paintings in the Bel Ami Competition are not heroic at all. They depict Anthony succumbing to his temptations—or at least we see no signs of resistance or salvation. In some instances, the Saint is tormented and his temptations approach martyrdom, but there is no apparition of God or Jesus like in the classical versions of Bosch or Grünewald. The indispensable attribute of the Holy Book, the physical presence of the Word of God, is absent in most of the works, appearing only in those by Louis Guglielmi and Abraham Rattner. The only heroic figure is Dalí’s Saint, who holds the parade of his fears and desires at a distance with a wooden cross. While the detailed, shocking torture of Ernst’s Saint initially blocks the view of the decalcomania in the middle ground of the picture, Dalí’s Anthony fends off the surreal temptations from the foreground, interposing himself between the viewer and the demonic phantasm. The Saint seems to stand in as a double of the artist, who protects us by dealing with the demons of surrealism on his own. The function of the Saint is confirmed by Dalí’s statement for the catalogue, stating that it still seems possible that Anthony may fight the “paranoic hallucinations of his temptations” emerging from the clouds, because “the Saint bears his cross to exorcise this vision” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 19). This optimism is significant, because the artist was preparing to return to Spain, back to Catholicism and fascism, and underwent—as rumor has it—an exorcism in 1947.⁴⁶ Thus, Dalí’s Saint can be considered a sign of the artist’s break with the aesthetics and politics of surrealism.⁴⁷

View Full Size

Figure 4

Dorothea Tanning, The Temptations of St. Anthony, Private Collection, 1946

Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 2026; 10.1163/25896377-tat00001

Source: Shell and Tostmann (2018: 230). Fair Use

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Refusing the virility and heroism of Dalí’s Saint, most of the competing artists celebrated the doom and disintegration of the figure: The humiliated body of Ernst’s Anthony is overwhelmed by monsters and on the verge of morphing into a non-human landscape. Similarly, in the contribution of Ivan Albright—who won second place—it is hard to discern the figure of the Saint attacked by animals and voluptuous women. Albright’s Anthony is swallowed up by a blurring subsoil of minerals and liquids, by an excess of detail and color: A snake and the contorted body of the protagonist remind us again of Laocoön’s struggle. In Carrington’s version, Anthony has three heads hiding in a ragged white cowl: The artist herself describes this cowl in her comment as a “monkish apparel” that “had been cleverly constructed out of used mummy wrappings in umbrella or sunshade forms” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 16). Her bloodless Saint seems more spectral than his demonic opponents: the temptress cooking a magical broth, the dancing Queen of Sheba, or the ram pouring forth a river out of a jar. Anthony, whose three heads shrink mise en abyme, is in danger of disappearing in the face of female magic, pagan characters, and esoteric symbols.⁴⁸ Likewise, Tanning’s painting assigns a decisive role to the hermit’s cowl (fig. 4): A whirlwind snatches Anthony’s cape, and the fold of his clothing reflects a plethora of headless female torsos. Tanning states: “colored with the beautiful colors of sex, his [Anthony’s] desires take shape even in the folds of his own wind-tossed robes” (American Federation of Arts, 1947: 28). The Saint’s cowl becomes a prismatic projection screen for male desire—a process that takes on increasing significance in the cinematic context. Beyond that, the heroic male body loses its constraints and becomes fluid. In all versions, Anthony transgresses gender and the status of a subject—he disrupts the principium individuationis. The Saint merges with the inorganic or organic backdrop of potential images, rocky landscapes, fluttering wrappings, crawling creatures, and erotic phantasm. When the “Need for a New Myth” recycles the demons of the past, St. Anthony loses his resistance. The new myth is post-heroic.

4 Temptation by Space

Doubtless, this undoing of heroic masculinity can be explained as a reaction to the traumatic experience of World War II. This applies to Ernst, who—as I mentioned—painted apocalyptic landscapes alluding to the ruins of Europe and probably adapted the passivity of Flaubert’s anti-hero that had shocked the first reviewers of the novel.⁴⁹ The finale of Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine culminates in Anthony’s desire to disappear into the vibrating bulk of matter. The Saint longs to blend into all species and merge with the ultimate fabric of the cosmos:

O happiness! Happiness! I have seen the birth of life, I have seen the beginnings of movement. The blood in my veins is beating so hard that it will burst them. I feel like flying, swimming, yelping, bellowing, howling. I’d like to have wings, a carapace, a rind, to breathe out smoke, wave my trunk, twist my body, divide myself up, to be inside everything, to drift away with odours, develop as plants do, flow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter—to be matter!

Flaubert, 1980: 232

The writer and theorist Caillois refers to this scene in his seminal articles “La Mante religieuse” (1934) and “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” (1935), both published in the surrealist art magazine Minotaure.⁵⁰ While the first article mentions Flaubert’s Tentation in a footnote, the second quotes bits from its last chapter, Anthony’s naturalistic unio mystica, to illustrate a new theory of mimicry—or better, “mimetism”:⁵¹

[…] Gustave Flaubert seems to have understood the meaning of the phenomenon, when he ends The Temptation of Saint Anthony with a general spectacle of mimicry [mimétisme] to which the hermit succumbs: “plants are now no longer distinguished from animals. … Insects identical with rose petals adorn a bush … And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures.” In thus seeing the three realms of nature merging into each other, Anthony in his turn suffers the lure of material space [séduction de l’espace matériel]: he wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything, “to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bottom of matter, to be matter.” The emphasis is surely placed on the pantheistic and even overwhelming aspect of this descent into hell, but this in no way lessens its appearance here as a form of the process of the generalization of space […].

Caillois, 1984: 31

Mixing poetic, biological, anthropological, and psychoanalytical concepts, the philosopher tries to explain mimetic morphology and the behavior of insects as a “dangerous luxury”, as a kind of “sympathetic magic”, evading Darwinist notions and hinting at an archaic “instinct of renunciation” gaining the upper hand over self-preservation.⁵² This instinct is active not only in insects but also in psychopathology, particularly in a weakness of the mind, a loss of psychic energy, which Caillois termed “legendary psychasthenia” (25 f.). Drawing on the psychological terminology of Pierre Janet and Eugène Minkowski, as well as on his own ascetic experience,⁵³ Caillois defines legendary psychasthenia as a “disturbance in the relation between personality and space”, which he understands allegorically as a “descent to hell”, namely in an all-devouring “dark space” (30).

Unlike Freud’s death drive, which played a crucial role in “La mante religieuse,” for Caillois the instinct of renunciation is more than a regressive return to a prenatal state—it rather results from a disorienting experience of space: “It is thus a real temptation by space [une véritable tentation de l’espace]” (28). Caillois’s tentation de l’espace is ambivalent since space is simultaneously the subject and the object of temptation. Seen as an object, space is the “invention” of the psychic subject, who then becomes the object of space itself: “[…] the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. […] he feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the ‘convulsive possession’ [possession convulsive]” (30). This circular description alludes to the famous definition of beauty as “convulsive”, which Breton proposed in the final sentence of Nadja (1924) and then later elaborated in his article “La beauté sera convulsive” (1934), published in the same issue of Minotaure as “La Mante religieuse”.⁵⁴

Breton uncovers convulsive beauty in the fixation of movement, the perfection of form, and the approximation of the inorganic and the organic. His exemplary models are stalactites, crystals, starfish, corals, and so forth. In contrast to Breton’s beauté convulsive, Caillois’s possession convulsive reflects a tendency towards indefinite space that drives organic forms and instincts back into an amorphous matter. Accordingly, the formless, the lifeless matter, and the death drive, which Breton’s aesthetics tended to suppress, came to the fore.⁵⁵ In this process, the possession convulsive is no longer the action purported by a psychic instinct, but rather an interaction between the subject and its surrounding space that finally relinquishes the status of an autonomous beholder. Redefining Freud’s Thanatos and Flaubert’s panpsychism, Caillois turned Breton’s convulsive beauty into a mimetic excess and a demonic possession. The psychological subject dissolves, or, as Michael Taussig puts it: “the mimicking self, tempted by space, spaces out” (1993: 34). From this perspective, St. Anthony’s ‘last’ temptation transforms into a triumph of space that inevitably blurs the distinction between subject and object, organism and milieu, figure and ground.

The essays “Mante religieuse” and “Mimétisme” were highly influential and affected the theories of Jacques Lacan and the Frankfurt School. At the same time, they boosted the surrealist cult of sexual cannibalism and mimetic insects that had already been embraced in many surrealist works of art. Mantises and locusts recur repeatedly in surrealist works by Dalí, Masson, Labisse, Ernst, and others.⁵⁶ In his book Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1928) Breton already underscored the surreal potential of mimetic insects in a passage on paintings of Yves Tanguy: “[…] the very idea of ‘three kingdoms’—animal, vegetable and mineral—is the height of absurdity. If a phyllium [a species of mimetic insects] alights on a branch, who can be sure that it is not a leaf from the tree that flies away a little later, leaving the leaf insect in its place?” (2001: 44 f.).⁵⁷ This rhetorical question anticipates “the three realms of nature merging into each other” that Caillois detects in the finale of Flaubert’s Tentation. Even though Caillois distanced himself from Breton in 1934, there remain many lasting points of contact with surrealism. He became part of Bataille’s Collège de sociologie (1937–1939) and published in the dissident surrealist revue Acéphale. Caillois and Ernst had known each other since the early days of surrealism and kept in touch. As late as 1967, Ernst designed a frontispiece for Caillois’s essay Oblique.⁵⁸

The praying mantis was a figurehead of surrealism even before Caillois published his essay on the insect. Caillois himself reports in his—posthumously published—work La Nécessité d’esprit (1933–1935) that Breton wanted to found a publishing house in 1924 with a praying mantis by Ernst as an emblem.⁵⁹ The publishing house was never realized. Yet several years later Ernst designed a praying mantis for the program of Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s film L’Age d’or (1930). Mimetic insects tenaciously reappear in Ernst’s later paintings, for example in Fêtes de la faim (1935) or La joie de vivre (1936). We do not know how strong the influence of Caillois was, but Tanning recalls that Caillois’s Mimétisme was among the favorite books that her husband had gathered in their refuge in Arizona.⁶⁰ So, it is not unlikely that Ernst had Caillois’s theory of mimétisme in mind when he painted his Temptation. A theory that originally sought to explain the behavior of insects was thus transferred to the artistic technique of decalcomania. But even if Ernst or the other participants in the Bel Ami Competition did not think primarily of Caillois’s and Flaubert’s accounts, the possession convulsive can be regarded as a key to understanding the disintegration of their depiction of St. Anthony. Against Ernst’s statements in “Au-delà de la peinture,” the mimicry of the demons and the mimetism of the Saint in his Temptation represent a process of disappearing rather than appearing. They seem to be no longer projections of the subject,⁶¹ that is, the Saint or viewer, but the product of the possession by space and hence dispossession of the subject. The figure blurs constantly with the ground, as in the famous photographic portrait of Ernst that Frederick Summer shot in Arizona (fig. 5).⁶² The artist himself concluded his autobiographical self-mystification with the statement: “that IDENTITY WILL BE CONVULSIVE OR WILL NOT EXIST [identité sera convulsive ou ne sera pas]” (1948: 19).⁶³

View Full Size

Figure 5

Frederick Summer, Max Ernst, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1946

Citation: Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 2026; 10.1163/25896377-tat00001

Source: Shell and Tostmann (2018: 204). Fair Use

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Ernst’s statement must be read against the backdrop of the broader engagement with spatial experience in the postwar avant-garde. Nonetheless, in the specific case of his Temptation, Caillois’s concept fits perfectly, because it treats space in terms of temptation by alluding to the legends of St. Anthony. In this spirit, Ernst’s translation of Breton’s aesthetics of convulsion owes less to Breton than to Caillois’s spatial redefinition, namely his radical idea of possession convulsive. This conclusion is confirmed by Ernst’s painting and the other predominant post-heroic versions of Anthony created for Lewin’s Private Affairs of Bel Ami. Their disintegration of the Saint challenges the predominant interpretation of the demons as pure psychological (subjective) projections and must instead be understood as a collective (objective) possession. Read as a reaction to the sustained trauma of the war, the temptations of the Saint became a tentation de l’espace on a visual—not only literary (Flaubert) or theoretical (Caillois)—level for the first time. This is altered by the shocking appearance of the painting in the film and the overwhelming impressions of the spectator, who cannot clearly distinguish the figure of Anthony within 10 languishing seconds. This adds a new dramatic cinematographic dimension to the iconography of the Saint. The disintegration is not only an (in)formal aesthetic process but also a reaction to history, as well as a restaging of an ancient hagiographical legend: St. Anthony waited for centuries to reappear on a canvas in full cinematic technicolor to succumb to his last and accidental temptation: surrealism.