Temptation of Saint Anthony

23 paintings, inspired by The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a prose poem by Gustave FLAUBERT (1849-1856-1870), published in 1874.

FLAUBERT's imaginary world deeply inhabited that of Micheline LO.

After this first series, produced in 1983-1984, she painted several others, from 1993 to 1995, inspired this time by FLAUBERT's novel Salammbô.

This series was inspired by desert hallucinations. In it, Antoine encounters laziness, gluttony, lust, and heresy. He suffers the devil's extravagances. A dozen large canvases and as many papers were born from reading Flaubert, whose sensory brilliance and explosive excess provoked the painter.

One day, she went down to her basement kitchen-cum-study, where she had written Flexte, to get a copy of Flaubert's Salammbô. But the book was nowhere to be found, and instead she picked up La Tentation de saint Antoine.

In the same manner as the Antoine of Flaubert had walked to the City, knee-deep in blood, the new painter advanced among the waves of heresies and colors, with some sixty sketches, and paintings — small, medium, or large.

Thierry Zeno, cinematographer of the sacred, whose Vase de Noces (the story of a man and his overly intimate relationship with a pig) had been shown around all the art houses of the world, had just completed a medium-length film for television on Les Tentations de Saint Antoine, spanning from Sassetta and Jérôme Bosch to Claude Lorrain and Max Ernst, which was commented on-screen by Claude Louis-Combet, the Burgundy novelist who wrote of the hysterical pregnancies of the Flemish beguines. Although the film was finished, Zeno re-opened it to include about ten large canvasses which, from the rough tissue of Avant la tentation to the flashes of light of Après la tentation, carried the major hallucinations of Anthony and of the Queen of Sheba.