The painting's central, gross, two-legged bulk began life as an ordinary photograph: a grain storage container belonging to the Konkombwa people of southern Sudan, raised off the ground on stilt-like legs, reproduced in an anthropological journal Ernst had come across^[1][2]. What Ernst saw in that structure was not agricultural architecture but the shape of a waddling animal, and he built the painting's monster directly from that misreading^[1]. Roland Penrose, who documented the source in detail, reproduced the original cornbin illustration alongside the painting to make the connection explicit^[2].

The word Celebes did not come from Ernst inventing a name; the island of Celebes is a real place in the Dutch East Indies, one of the Greater Sunda Islands, with a distinctive four-armed shape^[3]. According to Roland Penrose, Ernst's lifelong friend, the specific title came from a crude schoolboy rhyme about an elephant of Celebes, whose anal humour Ernst found amusing^[1]. Separately, the creature's outline bears a loose, general resemblance to the actual shape of the island on a map, though with its trunk in a different position, a coincidence some Surrealists took seriously enough to rank Celebes highly in their informal roster of countries of Surrealist interest^[1].

Although painted rather than physically cut and pasted, The Elephant Celebes works by the same logic Ernst used in his Dada collages: unrelated images, a grain bin, a de Chirico drafting instrument, a headless classical nude, brought into false proximity on one canvas^[3]. Ernst later described collage technique itself as the systematic exploitation of the coincidental encounter of two or more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane, the spark of poetry created by their proximity^[3]. The headless female nude in the foreground, wearing a single glove and apparently walking away from the monster, supplies exactly that kind of unrelated reality, dropped into the scene without any explanation offered or needed^[3].