“Watching him paint was like witnessing the birth of art.” “Congo’s ability to make a controlled abstract pattern and then to vary it in different ways meant that inside the ape brain there was already an aesthetic sense-very primitive but nevertheless present in a non-human species,” he says. Rather, as he tells Taylor Dafoe at artnet News, it’s what Congo’s art represents that's most important. Upon viewing Congo’s work, Salvador Dalí quipped the “hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!”Īs Morris explains, “The more serious the artist, the more they understood what Congo was doing because they could see that he was positioning his lines.” That being said, he cautions people from overhyping Congo’s artwork. Joan Miró swapped two of his pieces for one of Congo’s 400. Art world luminaries including Picasso bought his work. In 1957, Congo’s work went on display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Morris went on to feature the painting chimp on “Zoo Time,” and he became something of a sensation. “And if I tried to persuade him to go on painting after he considered that he had finished a picture, he would stubbornly refuse.” If I tried to stop him before he had finished a painting, he would have a screaming fit,” Morris says. Congo became increasingly obsessed with his regular painting sessions. While he never made any representational art, he did appear to have some chops when it came to abstract work, favoring a radiating fan pattern. Morris realized Congo could make circles and even had a sense of composition he filled in parts of the paper to balance his drawings.
Would it happen again? Yes, it did, and again and again.’” It wandered a short way and then stopped. “This is how I recorded it at the time, ‘Something strange was coming out of the end of the pencil. “He took it and I placed a piece of card in front of him,” Morris recalls. He’s also the author of many popular science books, including 1967’s The Naked Ape, which examines humans through a zoologists lens.Īs Nigel Reynolds at the Telegraph reports, one day Morris offered the young chimp Congo a pencil and the rest was history. He was a noted abstract painter, an ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior) and zoologist. show broadcast from the London Zoo in the 1950s. The paintings are owned by Desmond Morris, who hosted “Zoo Time,” a U.K. In December, a beloved 20th-century artist will finally get his due when a lot of 55 paintings by Congo the chimpanzee goes on exhibit at the Mayor Gallery in London.