Redfern desmond morris online 3

Desmond Morris WORKS ON PAPER 1948 –2018

To celebrate his 90th Birthday

Desmond Morris WORKS ON PAPER 1948 –2018

Essay by Will Self Foreword by Sir David Attenborough

20 Cork Street, London W1S 3HL +44 (0)20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com

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Desmond Morris in his Swindon studio in 1948.

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DESMOND MORRIS

A fascination for the natural world and great skill with pencil and paint are neither uncommon. Nor is it unusual for such characteristics to occur simultaneously in a single human being. Desmond Morris has certainly possessed both, right from an early age and to an extraordinary degree.

But with a strange difference. He has never felt any desire to combine them.

Why, he asked himself, try to put on paper or canvas what anyone can see for themselves? So he has always kept his two talents rigorously separate.

But he has indulged each of them - almost daily - for virtually all of his life.

He is both a realist and a surrealist.

He was born in a village in Wiltshire, an only child and – by his own account – a solitary one. A lake near his home obsessed him. He built himself a raft out of planks of wood with an iron drum strapped to each corner. On it, he floated round the lake, lying flat on his stomach with his eyes only an inch above the surface of the water. He was entirely alone and he couldn’t swim.

But there he spent hours gazing into its sunlit depths, lost in a world of waving weeds, speeding water-beetles and shoals of glinting fish.

At home, in the attic he discovered another source of wonder – an ancient brass microscope complete with sets of slides that had belonged to his great grandfather. Looking down its eyepiece, he saw other images that haunted him. Where else can a boy see visions that are both actual and beyond imagination? So he started to create a menagerie of creatures that were all his own.

These two obsessions – the one scientific, the other imaginative – flourished alongside one another throughout his boyhood. Nor did he have to decide

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when he left school, which of them might provide him with a livelihood, for although the Second World War was over, military conscription was still the law and the Army duly claimed him for its own inscrutable purposes. Yet even there, he managed to continue to paint and just before his release he courageously exhibited his pictures in Swindon where his mother now lived.

The few people who took any notice of the show were predictably outraged. The local paper was abusive. The pictures were for sale but no one bought any and it was clear to Desmond that, when it came to earning a living, it would not be surrealism that did so, but science.

So on his release from the Army, he went to study zoology, first at Birmingham University and then in Oxford where he joined a small research group that was laying the foundations of a new branch of natural science – ethology, the study of animal behaviour. There he started to learn how to observe scientifically and to do so with a demanding intensity that focussed on the smallest details - the precise actions used by a male stickleback to flaunt his red belly when courting a female, the movements made by a nesting gull as it cares for its chicks. Such observations, if you were skilful and dedicated enough, could be turned into statistics. They in turn might enable you to interpret the behaviour of quite unrelated species and perhaps even reveal a basic ethological principle. His career seemed set. Science had won. Explorations of the surreal would remain private.

But then, as he set off down the path of academia, he swerved slightly. It was the 1950’s and the dawn of television. The BBC, having started the world’s first public television service before the War, was now back in production with a single channel showing live, black and white pictures. But in 1956 the Government ruled that the Corporation’s monopoly had gone on long enough and that a second network should be created, financed by advertisements.

One of the new production companies, Granada Television, decided to create a series about animals. The BBC already produced several, in one of which I had accompanied a collecting expedition despatched by the London Zoo. It showed how animals were caught and then displayed them live in the studio. Granada decided that they would take that idea one step further. They would establish a permanent television unit actually inside London Zoo and would appoint some bright, inventive young zoologist to present the programmes. They found Desmond. The BBC were predictably outraged. London Zoo, they had assumed, was their territory and I was instructed not to have anything to do with this newcomer. Needless to say, I telephoned him immediately and we have been close friends ever since.

Desmond’s programmes immediately attracted large audiences and soon he had an animal star, a young male chimpanzee called Congo. He was such a

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Squatting Figures 1949 ink 30 Ă— 43 cm

success that Desmond for the first time, allowed his knowledge of science to combine with his passion for painting. He used the one to investigate the other.

What was the origin of the aesthetic sense that gave people such deep pleasure when contemplating images? So he started to find out with a series of brilliantly conceived experiments with Congo. Some were televised, some not. They ended with Congo being provided with paints and chalks and encouraged to create abstract designs for himself. Desmond described the whole investigation and the theories that lay behind it in the first of his many books. He entitled it, provocatively, The Biology of Art. Most critics maintained that the very title was a contradiction in terms.

There could be no such thing. Some were outraged. Most ignored it. But the experiments on which Desmond made his claims had been well based and some galleries were open-minded enough to hold exhibitions of Congo’s paintings. The great Catalan surrealist painter Joan Miró actually acquired one. But this first attempt by Desmond to unite his two passions did not get the recognition that it deserved and he turned his attention to writing about more orthodox scientific subjects.

But he also continued to paint. He did so every day and often late into the night. Few knew. The pictures were still surreal, inhabited by a great variety

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of truly extraordinary creatures. None of them resembled a living species of any kind. I suspect that had one done so, Desmond would have regarded the canvas as a failure and destroyed it. Some of these creatures were monsters, huge and alarming. Others elegant and extraordinarily beautiful. But one particular kind began to appear with increasing frequency. They were vividly alive, marvellously varied and clearly related to one another. They had eyes, usually in pairs. They supported themselves on legs that varied in both shape and number. Some were clearly solitaries. Others gathered together in small groups. And they are not only intriguing but painted with a bewitching delicacy. Desmond called them his biomorphs.

Science continued to dominate Desmond’s days. At the Zoo he gathered together a group of behavioural scientists – ethologists – to help study the animals in his charge and to devise new kinds of enclosures that were best suited to their needs.

But ethologists were starting to break down frontiers. Some were using their techniques to examine the behaviour of those animals with the most complex behaviour of all, human beings. Until then, that subject had been the preserve of sociologists. Ethologists, however, worked in a very different way. They, perforce, noted not what their subjects said but what they did. And the two kinds of enquiries produced very different results. Soon Desmond saw a subject for another book. He called it The Naked Ape. It created a sensation world-wide. Suddenly people everywhere became fascinated by ‘man-watching’, a term which Desmond had invented specially for the book. Ethological jargon began to invade everyday speech. People noted ‘displacement activities’ as a sign of boredom or frustration. They looked for ‘intention movements’ made by guests impatient to depart. They even, more sensationally, began to ponder on the significance of the resemblance between breasts and buttocks.

The book’s global success transformed Desmond’s life. For the first time, he could afford to devote himself entirely to painting and to do so whenever he wished. So he moved with his family to Malta to do just that and the surreal creatures of his imagination began to appear on canvas whenever their creator wished them to do so. Now for the first time, they had space. Soon giants six feet tall appeared in the spectacular pictures that hung on the walls of their villa.

But although surrealism could now dominate his imagination, the scientific investigative side of his character still stirred his mind. He noticed that Maltese fishermen decorated the bows of their boats with brilliant multi-coloured patterns. Each was an abstract work of art. No two were the same. That in itself

The Aforesaid 2002 mixed media and collage 30 × 21 cm 7

was remarkable and could not have happened by accident. And more than that.

Every fisherman looking at a boat knew immediately not only which part of the coast it came from but even the individual who owned it. But how? Desmond studied a sample group of four hundred boats and started to analyse them using a technique he called ‘quantified aesthetics’. Eventually he worked out the rules that governed these complex compositions – rules of which the fishermen themselves were quite unaware.

So the Morrises led a happy life, and Desmond painted more intensively than ever before. But eventually in 1974, after six years away, the Maltese idyll came to an end and the family returned to Britain.

They settled in Oxford. There, with so much else going on, particularly in the field of zoology, the surreal world had to retreat a little. And in any case Desmond’s love of natural history had not evaporated. While he continued to paint, he also wrote. But among books about leopards and lions, pandas and owls, there appeared a dictionary describing in detail all the breeds of domesticated dogs. It is a major work and clearly the result of a great deal of intensive research. An odd subject you might think. But it was an indication of the grip that biomorphs continued to hold on his mind. All domesticated dogs are descended from one species, the wolf. A single set of genes has been manipulated by breeders over many centuries to produce forms as varied in size as a miniature poodle and a bull mastiff, and as different in character as a borzoi and bulldog. Why should that interest Desmond? Because although his biomorphs live only in his mind, he believes that to carry conviction his images of them must nonetheless conform to evolutionary laws. If they flout them, then their portraits will lose all conviction and the picture, in Desmond’s estimation, becomes a failure. So the evidence of what a single genome, that of a wolf, could produce would indicate how varied biomorphs could be.

So biomorphs, in Desmond’s imagination, are just as subject to the laws of the universe as any species of living animal. Where do they live? Presumably on a planet in some kind of solar system, for a sun appears in the skies above them and illuminates them with a light that casts sharp shadows. You can also see from the way that they stand that they are subject to the pull of gravity. So although they may teeter and occasionally lean on props, none so far has been seen either to collapse or drift away into space.

What habitat do they favour? Those that appeared half a century ago had little around them. Maybe they were floating like the creatures their creator saw down his microscope or in the depths of a pond. But then as time passed, some appeared which were clearly living on a land although there is no sign of water or vegetation. Occasionally a mountain range can be seen in the far distance,

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The Premonition 2008 (reworked in 2015) mixed media 29 × 41 cm

but for the most part, the ground is bare with not even the smallest boulder to trip them up or interfere with their strange gyrations and gavottes.

And they have a vivid social life. Some are clearly very gregarious and parade in well-organised ranks and columns. They flirt and they copulate. They are swayed by emotions – anger, amusement, agression. They eat, they grow and they are overtaken by old age.

Their creator watches them with as much interest as so many of the rest of us do. What will they do next? They are certainly slowly evolving. New species appear and often prosper. Others vanish to be seen no more. And it seems that not only are they evolving, they are exploring. Now, maybe in celebration of Desmond’s ninetieth birthday, they may be venturing into a new environment where a different order of biomorphic creatures may await them. There may yet be a new chapter in the history of life on their remote and distant planet. There are many, like me, who are eagerly awaiting to see what will happen next.

David Attenborough, 2018

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The Fence has Three Sides: A Dialogue between Desmond Morris and Will Self

Elisabeth Bergner and it was called Dreaming Lips… I loved the way the lights went down… and this screen lit up… and it was like magic… the dreaming lips slither from the everravening mouth of the future – kiss their way, with loving dabs, back into the past – leaving in their tender wake a silvery trail of tiny saliva beads, caught in the quivery filaments that flick from one second to the next. Capture one – why don’t you? Pinion this bead between glass screens, then bend to the hooded lens …the lights go down, the screen lights up… the auteur’s own wife plays the part of an unfaithful and divisive biomorph… a mere protuberance to begin with, bulging out from the colloidal mass that slow-revolves across the map of Mitel Europa, at first the spiral arms of a galaxy – latterly the angular ones of a… swastika. You see the most fanciful of things – what can it be that makes you so… curious? The very best of directors create a dream we can all share in… the protuberance becomes a bubo – that swells into a bolus but poorly yoked to the colloidal mass, then splits away to float in amniotic fluid, together with a thousand million motes of data… It’s all data then – hard empirical data, the fruit of countless hours of observation...? Not so – and I challenge these dicta: that what’s good for General Motors is good for Homo Erectus, and we are nought save the aluminium foil Time’s amalgam bites down on – besides the slide has three sides… And the screen – the screen, too?

The screen, and the world-girdling fence that encircles us all. See – see here: bend your eye to the hooded lens while I turn it… so… back-and-forth, very rapidly, a stroboscopic flicker from one eye to the next… left-to right, left hemisphere to right hemisphere, because the hemispheres have specialisation, one hemisphere is concerned with analysis and the other with intuition…

You’ve only one shot at it, boyo – so give it your all, and follow me down–­­Down where? The rabbit hole? The ravening mouth of… time? No, neophyte – down the Rift Valley that runs between the slides, between the screens… and between the fences of simple posts, strung with barbed wire, that snake up and over the rounded mounds of the Wiltshire downs… Join me there, where so many lineages go to ground in the mulched middens of the distant past – where Nehemiah Grew began his comparison, perhaps idly lifting one distended sac from the bucket at his feet and holding it up to the diamond-patterned mullions, so that vernal sunlight streamed through its fine filigree of vessels and tissue… before bending to the bucket once more… So, the pity of… war? War, if it’s a battle to draw each breath rattling down into your corrupted lungs, then expel it, crepitating, through the attics of your mind, where lacrosse racquets moulder beside damp and prolapsing steamer trunks, and boxes of leather- and linen-bound volumes, pregnant with actualities… And what did you find there, on this third side of the fence? This.

A simple pebble? Maybe to you – but look, it has the uncanny appearance of a not-quitehuman face – the visage of an alternate order of creation… Moreover, it’s anointed with a pigment not found in this area or era – an oil paint from the distant future, and the other side of the Rift… Are you suggesting this was done by Palaeolithic individual whose remains it was found alongside? By no means – I said anointed, not painted. What I’m suggesting is far more

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significant – that this was an objet trouvé retrieved from the third side of the fence – a gallstone, or some other grisly remnant, plucked from the gut bucket of the mortuary, and the charnel house of the mid-twentieth century… all that jazz: an ensemble of skeletons, blowing cool through the tibias of their vanquished enemies. Forgive me, we don’t know one another at all, yet this orotund manner, I think, doesn’t suit you. I carry it with me still – that remnant. And now, if you’ll follow me… along here, and then through here, and then down these stairs, and past this niche jumbled up with pre-Colombian artefacts… Here – no, here: insinuate yourself between these two walls. Yes, yes – it is a tight fit between the dreaming lips, but it’s quite impossible for you to understand the properties of my pictorial spaces, if you won’t follow… The molecular structure of your biomorphs is, I’m told, surprising. Seen through the lens of a microscope, it can be established that they are indeed constituted by infinitesimally smaller biomorphs that fuse and fission to form forms formally – and formerly – fissiparous. But not in formaldehyde! Look – what would you have me say? I, myself am ever-surprised by the bright colours of the internal organs and their smoothly curved shapes… and yes: no man comes – I would not have it so… But here, in the world between the walls – on the third side of the fence, I see lineages extending, the way taxonomic diagrams of genera and phyla are arranged on ancient pages… That’s right – and if you follow me through here and ascend the staircase that spirals up ribonucleic stairs and deoxyribonucleic risers, you’ll find yourself walking along the cool and shaded pathways, between the tinkling fountains, the heady scent of roses in bloom perfuming your atheism. One thing: he doesn’t bite – my Cerberus – but he is compulsively retromingent… Meaning? He braces his front paws against the walls of Hades, and pisses back in the face of the present from the far future… Again, I don’t mean to be rude, but this seems – well, only an Americanism will suffice – sophomoric. Moreover, I can’t help feeling we well may be heading towards some Eliotic insight – that we will have circumambulated the picture’s plane, only to discover we’ve followed a Mobius strip, and returned to the point in space-time where we began, ooh – what is it? – some seventy years since...? Piss off! I’ve no need of your cleverness, or your clarity. Follow me along this corridor, past the Willendorf fertility charms, the bead-decorated gourds, the nose flutes and the bedizening clay blobs of Ming funerary food.

Now, peer into this wall-mounted periscope, ornamented with cloisonné at the court of Louis Seize – what can you see? A city, perhaps – at any rate, a loose framework of cells or compartments. I’m reminded of the way in the latter decades of the last century we all sat, for hour-upon-hour, staring into these over-lit cubicles – lightboxes, really, upon which were lain the transparent lies of our science. Our midget, whose art is in heaven, forever and ever… Tom Thumb! What! What is this hocus-pocus? Some strange ontological pantograph has been applied – and we’ve been repurposed! We’re shrunk to the size of your biomorphs – and find ourselves compartmentalised with a moustachioed blob, which admonishes us– It’s just a matter of controlling inflation… if you can manage that you can see all there is to… see… You agree? For myself, I’ve always remained detached – and blown raspberries through dreaming lips… You see, I stand on my side of the fence – the fence has three sides, a third of which is mine. Here comes no man, there is room for many others, there is immense space, there is endless time, but no man comes, I would not have it so… In the small hours – possibly a little inebriated – I rearranged the dark walls of this natal cleft, hung with slickly brilliant entrails, and so reconfigured my biomorphic world to change the trauma of birth into a self-actualised metamorphosis… So, the protuberance becomes a bubo – that swells into a bolus but poorly

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yoked to the colloidal mass, then splits away to float in amniotic fluid…? Is this some sort of foundational myth? Not quite – follow me, from compartment to compartment and see: the biomorphs come from all directions, all dimensions – it’s an ingathering of the differing doodles, Mother Nature’s several and various attempts to create lifeforms that can survive in this harsh environment of ochreas nothing. Is it that the evolutionary tree of your biomorphs resembles that of Homo Sapiens itself? An explosion of heterogenous forms, followed by millennia of attrition, whittling away and extinction, until only one matriarchal blob is left– Wobbling, oscillating, vibrating with synesthetic intensity – can you hear it? Yes, there’s some truth in what you say: there have been far-flung and Denisovan blobs, quite as much as Desmondan ones – moreover, I believe the remains of some pygmy biomorphs have been found on a remote Indonesian island, evidence of allopatric speciation occurring in the genus long after my biomorphs first slithered into existence. Since you seem intent on being wilfully obtuse, I’ll simplify it: art is making the complex out of the simple, science is making the simple out of the complex. Because what you’re doing with art is to take a few colours, pigments or other materials, and transform them into the Mona Lisa – that’s taking facile things and creating this extraordinarily difficult image. By contrast, science interrogates the complicated messes that comprise our world, finds the simplest and most elegant equation or heuristic to explain one of them, or some other hitherto inexplicable phenomenon… I’m sensitive to things like segmentation, allometric growth patterns and all the other phenomena of biology, and those things are bound to have an impact on me… Are you claiming that, counterintuitively, it’s your right hemisphere that renders the world more complex, while your left simplifies? All I know is that I’ve never done any preliminary sketches at all – rather, my art is retromingent, pissing pigment back from the future into the worn canvas face of the past… Why, I work almost exclusively at night, under artificial lights, my biomorphs taking their nutriments from silence and concentration… In this house, where Murray attempted to fix the limits of a natural language, I, too, am engaged in a similar task of creative taxonomy… I range my canvas gut buckets all around the place, perform my synthetic a priori autopsy – and Blob’s your Uncle! You speak with confidence now – but there must have been times when you felt embattled? After all, you have been a retromingent controversialist, by your own admission – and it was a burning hot day when the auto da fé arrived to sort you out…? Ha! Ha, ha, ha! If there’s one thing the intolerant don’t understand – one simple fact their numinous theoretic cannot account for, it’s this: that the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t operate in the realm of the right hemisphere, and burning books – or canvases for that matter – only increases their potential energy… So, art does reverse time – after all, you are old Father Desmond, one would hardly suppose that your eye was as steady as ever. Yet you balance that eel on the end of your nose – what’s made you so excessively clever? In my youth, you know, I observed eels for months – donning scuba equipment to swim with them back to the Saragossa – and I innovated, y’know, new means of bat-catching with electric torches… despite the blackout. We’ve been talking for aeons, now – and I’ve answered three-to-the-power-of-thirty of your picayune questions… My legs may not be quite what they were, but if you persist, I’ll do a handstand and piss you downstairs… He fell silent at this point and employed gestures alone to indicate I should assist him: moving the heavy paintings, pinioned on the one side by wood, on the other by glass. We heaved them along the cluttered corridors, and, one-by-one, fed them into the ravening maw, between the lovely plaster lips.

We thrust them into this liminal and isolate space – the effort made me feel nauseous, but he

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remained sprightly: This is a mere bagatelle! He cried, If you – as I – have had to stack screaming popes, or haul the piss-soaked mattresses of retromingent bards down the stairs, and out into the bright light of another day – my thirty-two thousand, eight-hundred-and-fiftieth on this fascinating blob of ours… It wasn’t until we were in his car, staring at the misty orange aureoles haloing the streetlamps along the Banbury Road, that I realised: far from feeling replete, or otherwise satisfied, our dialogue had filled me up with curiosity. Curiouser and curiouser I felt, as we circumnavigated the Ashmolean, and proceeded haltingly down Beaumont Street – a ravening curiosity: a golden and suspicious thread that drew me into the future… You see, he said, arranging his capable hands on the steering wheel, c’est manifique, mais ce n’est pas la gare – I fear you may well miss your train… But he was wrong: at the station I found it had been delayed. Ranged along the platform, encased in bulbous and brightly-coloured kapok-filled garments, were commuters waiting to hurl themselves into transit. As they jostled about me, growing denser and more minatory by the moment, so they metamorphosed into their biomorphic essence, and I grew attuned to their segmentation, allometric growth patterns and all the other phenomena of their emergent biology. The electronic signboard did its digital thing – and as the seconds ticked past, silver saliva beads caught in the wrist hairs of interwar virtuosi, I grew increasingly anxious: if the biomorphs on the platform reached some sort of critical mass, we might all fall, so many old pennies, into the path of Progress. And I remembered placing American pennies on the branch line behind the Kahns’ house which stood on the shores of Cayuga Lake. I couldn’t’ve been more than five or six. My mother and I placed the cent coins on the rails and retreated to a safe distance. The train came rumbling past: wagon-after-wagon of rusty freight, steely wheels whispering through the crab grass – and when, at last, it was gone, all that remained were the coins, beaten out by the wheels into thin biomorphic shapes‒ No. That’s not quite right. Standing there on platform one at Oxford Station, it wasn’t my own souvenir that returned to me, tarnished and worn from decades of pocket-borne abrasion – but some other bimorph, round and pebble-hard, and eroded so as to resemble a face – human or otherwise – and stained with some pigment pissed back from the future. I held it warm in my hand, as the train coasted past the biomorphic cooling towers of Didcot Power Station. And at Paddington, I dropped it deep inside my pocket, before summoning myself, and striding off across the ochreous pictorial space, beneath the cast iron stretchers that hold the glass screens… slides… fences – what you will – in place. On the tube, I held it inside my pocket, warding off the evil eyelessness of those around me. I carry it with me still… You’ll carry it with you… forever.

London, January, 2018

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The Lector 2009 ink 30 × 21 cm 14

Public Partners I 2001 ink 25 × 19 cm 15

The Vigilante 2011 ink 30 × 21 cm 16

The Familiar One 2013 mixed media 21 × 30 cm 17

The Expert 2012 ink 30 × 21 cm 18

The Builder 2000 ink 38 × 25 cm 19

Thinking Head 1947 ink 6 × 7 cm 20

Head 1974 ink 21 × 14 cm 21

Eye Figure 1951 ink 40 × 26 cm 22

The Innovator 1997 mixed media 30 × 21 cm 23

Birdman 1951 ink 26 × 20 cm 24

Night Figure 2003 mixed media and collage 30 × 21 cm

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Original Thinker 2001 ink 30 Ă— 21 cm 26

Woman of the World 1950 ink and pastel 40 Ă— 26 cm 27

The Song of Time 2014 ink 30 × 21 cm 28

The Couple I 2015 ink 30 × 21 cm 29

Four Friends 1997 ink 21 × 30 cm 30

The Doyen 2003 ink 30 × 21 cm 31

The Professional 2005 ink 30 × 21 cm 32

The Last Tribe 2006 ink 30 × 21 cm 33

The Broker 2000 ink 38 × 25 cm 34

The Nomads 2014 ink 30 × 21 cm 35

Two Drinks 1949 ink 27 × 28 cm 36

Touch and Go 2001 ink 30 × 21 cm 37

Portrait of Willie 1951 ink 22 Ă— 20 cm 38

The Matriarch 1997 ink 25 Ă— 18 cm 39

Frail Figure 2013 mixed media 30 × 21 cm 40

Bird Machine 1950 ink and pastel 40 Ă— 26 cm 41

Priapus Abroad 1951 ink 13 × 9 cm 42

The Grafter 2013 mixed media 30 × 21 cm 43

A collection of amulets in the artist’s studio.

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The Suitor 2001 ink 25 × 19 cm 46

Pedigree Ceiling 2002 mixed media and collage 30 Ă— 21 cm 47

The Discoverer 2001 ink 27 × 21 cm 48

The Couple II 2015 ink 30 × 21 cm 49

The Amenable 2001 ink 27 × 21 cm 50

The Mentor 2010 ink and pastel 30 Ă— 21 cm 51

The Huntress 1999 mixed media 17 × 21 cm 52

The Keeper of Unwanted Secrets 2009 mixed media 30 × 21 cm 53

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Ancestral Figure 2002 mixed media and collage 30 Ă— 21 cm 56

Imaginary Saboteur 2002 mixed media and collage 30 Ă— 21 cm 57

Three Studies for Statues I 1948 (colour added in 2016) ink 20 × 33 cm 58

Feudal Figure 2013 mixed media 30 × 21 cm 59

The Deceiver 1997 mixed media 30 Ă— 21 cm 60

Three Studies for Statues II 1948 (colour added in 2016) ink 20 × 33 cm 61

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The Brazen 2000 ink 38 × 25 cm 64

The Propagator 1997 mixed media 25 Ă— 18 cm 65

The Betrothed 2000 ink 38 Ă— 25 cm 66

The Broad-Minded 2000 ink 38 × 25 cm 67

SHORT BIOGRAPHY Desmond Morris was born in Purton, Wiltshire in 1928. His interest in surrealism began when he was at boarding school during World War II and he made his first surrealist drawings in 1944. He was conscripted into the army in 1946 and in 1947 was appointed lecturer in fine arts at the Chisledon Army College. In 1948 he held his first solo exhibition. In 1950 he shared his first London exhibition with Joan Miro at the London Gallery of Edouard Mesens. In the same year he made a surrealist film Time Flower.

During this period he was an active member of the Birmingham surrealist group led by Conroy Maddox. With a degree in zoology from Birmingham University, he moved to Oxford University in 1951 to study for a doctorate in animal behaviour. While there he held an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 1952 and in the same year married Oxford graduate Ramona Baulch. For the next 20 years he devoted himself to his zoological career and, although he stopped exhibiting during this period, he always maintained a studio and never ceased painting. In 1974 he began exhibiting again in London and, since then, has held 49 solo exhibitions in England, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and the USA, including six retrospectives. At the age of 90 he is still actively painting in his Oxford studio.

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left:

Desmond Morris in his black bedroom, covered in mural images, 1948.

S O L O E X H I B I T I O N H I S TO RY 1948 Swindon Public Library 1950 London Gallery 1952 New Gallery, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1974 Stooshnoff Fine Art, London 1976 Wolfson College, Oxford 1976 Quadrangle Gallery, Oxford 1976 Lasson Gallery, London 1976 Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.

Retrospective 1978 Galerie D’Eendt, Amsterdam 1987 Mayor Gallery, London 1988 Shippee Gallery, New York 1988 Keats Gallery, Knokke-Le-Zoute, Holland 1989 Mayor Gallery, London 1991 Galerie Michele Heyraud, Paris 1991 Mayor Gallery, London 1993 Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.

Retrospective 1994 Mayor Gallery, London 1996 City Museum and Art Gallery,

Stoke-on-Trent. Retrospective 1996 Nottingham Natural History Museum.

Retrospective 1996 Atrium Bookshop, Cork Street, London 1997 Mayor Gallery, London 1997 Charleston Gallery, Near Firle, Lewes,

East Sussex 1997 Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Buxton, Derbyshire 1998 Clayton Gallery, Newcastle 1998 Keitelman Gallery, Brussels

1998-9 Jessy Van der Velde Gallery, Antwerp 1999 Art Consultancy Witteveen, Amsterdam 1999 Mayor Gallery, London 2001 Galerie Pack-Huys, Mechelen, Belgium 2002 Museum of Modern Art, Ostend, Belgium.

Retrospective 2002 Mayor Gallery, London 2002 Art Consultancy Witteveen, Amsterdam 2003 Solomon Gallery, Dublin 2004 Mayor Gallery, London 2005 Art Consultancy Witteveen, Amsterdam 2005 Guillermo de Osma Galeria, Madrid 2005 Alexander Clayton Art, Stratford-upon-Avon 2006 Gallery Pack-Huys, Mechelen, Belgium 2007 Said Gallery, Oxford 2008 Mayor Gallery, London 2008 Williamson Art Gallery and Museum,

Birkenhead. Retrospective 2008 Galerie Witteveen, Amsterdam 2010 Verbeke Foundation, Belgium 2010 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2011 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2012 ISPA Gallery, Lisbon 2012 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2013 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2014 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2014 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2015 O3 Gallery, Oxford 2015 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2016 Taurus Gallery, Oxford 2017 Taurus Gallery, Oxford

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PA I N T I N G S I N P U B L I C COLLECTIONS

1946/36 A GIRL SELLING FLOWERS Public Art Gallery, Swindon, Wilts, England.

1957/8 TOTEM Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport.

1947/21 THE DEPARTURE The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

1960/4 THE EXPANSIVE INVITATION The Currier Museum, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.

1948/27 THE RED DANCER La Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna, Rome.

1948/28 RED AND ORANGE SITUATION. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

1948/33 THE HERMIT DISCOVERED City Art Gallery, Southampton.

1949/2 THE JUMPING THREE Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, England.

1949/37 WAR-WOMAN The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

1949/38 THE PROPOSAL Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum, London, England.

1949/73 THE TRAPPINGS OF PRIVACY The Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum, London, England.

1960 DESERT UNIPEDS I City Art Gallery, Southampton.

1965/5 THE MYSTERIOUS GIFT Public Art Gallery, Swindon, Wilts, England.

1972/18 DYADIC ENCOUNTER Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. 1976/5 THE PRESENTATION Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas, USA. 1976/6 THE ARENA The Tate, London 1996/2 BIRD FEAR City Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, England.

left:

Desmond Morris with prehistoric female figurines, 1973. opposite:

Desmond Morris in the Mnajdra megalithic temple on the island of Malta in 1968.

Photograph by Patrick Lichfield.

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BOOKS WRITTEN ABOUT THE ART OF DESMOND MORRIS

1987 THE SECRET SURREALIST Philip Oakes 1991 THE SURREALIST WORLD OF DESMOND MORRIS Michel Remy 1997 FIFTY YEARS OF SURREALISM Silvano Levy 1999 NAKED SURREALISM Silvano Levy 2001 DESMOND MORRIS: ANALYTICAL CATALOGUE RAISONNE Silvano Levy 2004 A LOST WORLD Andrew Murray 2007 DARK INSIDE MY HEAD Desmond Morris 2008 LINES OF THOUGHT Silvano Levy 2012 DESMOND MORRIS: CATALOGUE RAISONNE 2000-2012 Silvano Levy 2014 HEADWORKS Desmond Morris

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Desmond Morris would like to thank the Directors of the Redfern Gallery for organising this solo exhibition of his work at the Redfern Gallery in May 2018.

This exhibition is taking place exactly 70 years after his first visit to the Redfern Gallery in 1948.

A very special thank you to Sir David Attenborough and Will Self.

Also many thanks to Susan Attenborough, James Birch, Paul Conran, Clare Conville, Michael Healey, Silvano Levy, Ramona Morris, Jason Morris, Andrew Murray, James Mayor, Michel Remy, Martin Turner, Emily FitzRoy, Doug Atfield and Graham and Jane Rees.

Foreword © Sir David Attenborough, 2018 Essay © Will Self, 2018 Will Self is a writer, he lives in South London.

Photography of works: Douglas Atfield Design: Graham Rees Design Published to coincide with the exhibition To celebrate his 90th Birthday Desmond Morris – Works on Paper 1948 –2018 at The Redfern Gallery 16 May – 9 June 2018 Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2018 ISBN: 978-0-948460-74-6 All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.

20 Cork Street, London W1S 3HL +44 (0)20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com

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front cover:

Figure in Love 2013 mixed media 30 × 21 cm inside front cover:

Beware of the Dog II 2001 ink 30 × 21 cm title page:

Flying High 1987 ink 25 × 32 cm back cover:

The Winner 2011 ink 30 × 21 cm opposite:

Desmond Morris with an African Bambara Tribe figure from Mali. Oxford 1996.

Essay by Will Self

Foreword by Sir David Attenborough

To celebrate his 90th Birthday

Desmond Morris