At the age of eighteen, Desmond Morris was idly wandering the stacks of the library when a book caught his eye. When he unshelved it and scanned its pages, Morris stumbled across a host of macabre etchings; dismembered bodies, demonic creatures, violence, and death were suspended in time on each page. Goya’s The Disasters of War forever changed the way that Morris thought of art. At the time, Morris says in his monograph The Secret Surrealist, he thought of art as “effete nonsense akin to flower-arranging and embroidery,”33 but suddenly he had access to a new way of describing the world. He immediately began drawing, painting, a composing films.
Just four years later, Morris was showing in London with Joan Miró. But it was to be the zenith of his career. The exhibit was a commercial failure, and, embittered, Morris resolved to “go underground,” renouncing the art establishment.34 His experiences as an artist are mentioned in neither The Biology of Art, nor The Naked Ape, but as it turns out, his experience in filmmaking is what got him the job on the London Zoo and Granada Television show “Zootime,”35 which eventually allowed him to propose the addition of a program mascot: Congo.
33 Morris, Desmond. The Secret Surrealist. Oxford: Phaidon, 1987. Print. p.13
34 Morris, p.14.
35 Lenain, Thierry. Monkey Painting. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Print.