Temptations of St. Anthony

In the 3rd Century, Saint Anthony the Egyptian renounced all worldly joys, went off into the Arabian Desert to live the life of a hermit. He had a terrible time of it. Often he would glance up from his prayers to see Satan hovering before him in the gloom of his abandoned fort. And Satan was hard to recognize; usually he looked like the things Anthony missed most.*

In the 20th Century, Max Ernst (see col. 3) renounced the pleasures of painting the sunlit world he saw around him. By concentrating on the feathered, taloned, sharp-toothed horrors visible to his inner eye, Ernst became modern art's first surrealist (old masters Bosch, Brueghel, Gruenewald, and others had been there be fore him). All Ernst had to do was to close his eyes to see Satan hovering before him in the studio. And Ernst's Satan was easy to recognize: he invariably looked like everything that Ernst feared most.*

This week Hollywood's Loew-Lewin Productions announced that Ernst was the $3,000 prizewinner in a "Temptation of St. Anthony" contest. The producers had persuaded twelve apostles of Modern Art to paint what Anthony saw. (Each artist got $500 for trying.) Ernst's winning picture will be used in a movie, Bel Ami or The History of a Scoundrel, starring George Sanders and having nothing to do with Anthony. It was not the first time Messrs. Loew and Lewin had brought art to Hollywood. Their Picture of Dorian Gray centered around a worm-crawling canvas painted by the Albright brothers, to portray Oscar Wilde's character .after his sins caught up with him. Few of the paintings of Anthony's temptation looked seductive enough to tempt a saint; mostly they seemed to show Anthony suffering the torments of hell.

Max Ernst's prizewinner was an expert nightmare (see cut). Runners-up: Belgian Paul Delvaux, who sent a study of three disarmingly naked, disarmingly beautiful women in a ruined, neo-classical landscape; Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, for an ulcerous omelet of flesh, fish, snakes and rodents; Salvador Dali, whose desert caravan of spider-legged elephants "carrying on their backs erotic fountains, obelisks, churches and escorials" (see cut) for once was pretty comprehensible.

* According to Novelist Gustave Flaubert, Satan once disguised himself as the Queen of Sheba, exclaimed to Anthony: "I am not a woman; I am a world. My cloak has only to fall for thee to discover a succession of mysteries."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.