Temptation of Saint Anthony (1904)

Gyula Tichy was born in 1879, he finished his schooling in Rozsnyó. In 1898 he enrolled in the School of Drawing in Budapest, where he learned the art of drawing and painting under the guidance of László Gyulai and later Bertalan Székely. Although he only spent two weeks in Nagybánya, what he saw and experienced there was a revelation to him. 'He was one of the most important masters of Hungarian graphic art', as the critic János Szablya once said of him. His first solo and last exhibition, in which his works were shown together with his brothers Kálmán, took place in 1916. His genius was recognised by few of his contemporaries, but in recent decades his oeuvre has attracted the interest of the profession and the public. 

Gyula Tichy illustrated several books, published graphic albums (the best known of which is The Tales of a Bottle with an Inkwell, 1909), and published drawings in the magazines Móka and Ház. Very early on, he became interested in science fiction novels and fairy tales, but he also wrote his own (The Prisoners of Mars). In them, unlike his brother, he did not seek an idyllic world, but great contrasts, Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness. In the review of his 1916 exhibition it is rightly written that 'Gyula Tichy takes the horse of his imagination to an even stronger gallop [...] and conjures up a wonderful fairy-tale world with beautiful dreamless women, terrible evil mountain elves, great rewards and terrible punishments'. His early graphic work was inspired by the English and Viennese Art Nouveau masters Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Crane and Gustav Klimt. In his oeuvre, the modern ideas and current issues of the time (the role of women, the contrast between town and country, urban themes, technological progress) were expressed in allegorical form, in the linear, ornamental language of Art Nouveau. Later on, it involved a loosening of the Art Nouveau mould, the development of a new, more natural, albeit subtly archaic style and a bold broadening of the subject. From then on, the desire for scientific knowledge became intertwined with the image of the scientist, the woman who watches over and guides the work of the man who experiments, or who is indifferent to human effort or a demon of destruction. In these late prints, Gyula Tichy almost anticipates futurism and constructivism. According to Ottó Mezei, "if we try to read the thought of editing fantastic landscapes, bizarre buildings, strange creatures, young female nudes and deformed apes, machines and machine-like creatures into images and drawings, we can infer the intention of a narrative treatment of concepts such as passing, anxiety, fear, threat, cataclysm". 

The Temptation of Saint Anthony is from 1904, during the early period in Tichy's graphic work, as it bears Art Nouveau elements in its style.