You could never have a short conversation with Desmond Morris, one of the last surviving Surrealists, who has died at the age of 98. During the past decade, we had an ongoing exchange about his student years (and pranks) in Birmingham, hanging a snake around Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s neck, and getting \u201chooked\u201d on collecting African masks, among many other things. These stories reflect his remarkable dual existence as both scientist and artist, which were interconnected from the start.<\/p>\n
Born in Wiltshire on 24 January 1928 to Harry Morris, an author of children\u2019s fiction, and Marjorie Morris, he found Surrealism by chance. \u201cI was at boarding school and, one day in 1944, when I was 16, I went into the school library and found a book that contained essays about Surrealism,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
Understanding the Surrealist movement as \u201ca rebellion against the slaughter of the First World War\u201d, he wanted to join this revolt \u201cagainst the lunacy of the adult world\u201d. Inspired by the likes of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dal\u00ed, he made his first Surrealist sketches during that year and when the war was over \u201cstarted painting in earnest\u201d.<\/p>\n
The subject for these compositions he discovered through the lens of his great-grandfather\u2019s Victorian microscope. After rescuing this beautiful brass instrument from the family attic, he placed a saucer full of pond water beneath it and was not only amazed to observe shape-shifting patterns but moved to depict them.<\/p>\n
After completing two years of army service in 1948, Morris went to the University of Birmingham to read zoology and continue what he had started. \u201cIt was my intention to spend most of my time doing drawings under the microscope\u2014of biological organisms that fascinated me.\u201d<\/p>\n
While there, Morris joined the Birmingham Surrealists, who included Conroy Maddox, brothers John and Robert Melville, Emmy Bridgwater and Oscar Mellor. Meeting at Maddox\u2019s house, he remembers, \u201cthere were endless arguments and debates\u2014which was typical of all Surrealist meetings\u201d.<\/p>\n
But they were also unified by fierce opposition to London\u2019s Surrealists. They believed that many of these artists, including Henry Moore, were involved in the movement just for exposure. \u201cThere was a popular preconception that just because Birmingham was the second city and London was the first, the art of the latter had to be more significant than the art of the former,\u201d Morris explained. \u201cBecause of this illogical notion, we tried harder\u2014we wanted to show not only that we too were Surrealists, but also that we were truer to the ideals of the movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1949 Morris travelled to France in search of Surrealism\u2019s founder, Andr\u00e9 Breton. \u201cI had his address and phone number in my pocket but sadly he was away from Paris while I was there,\u201d Morris said. \u201cI did, however, meet some of the other Surrealists, including one who was working on a project that involved building a life-size pyramid underground in Wales. What else?\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in Birmingham, Morris staged his own stunt, which should be understood as an early example of installation art. Behind the zoology department, he spotted an elephant\u2019s skull that had been discarded due to its poor condition. \u201cAs far as I was concerned, its eroded surfaces rendered it even more remarkable, as a piece of natural \u2018sculpture\u2019\u2014what the Surrealists referred to as an objet trouv\u00e9,\u201d he said. \u201cI decided that such an object should inspire a sense of wonder and determined to bring it to people\u2019s attention.\u201d Taking it by tram into the city centre, Morris left this surreal object sitting in a shop doorway. The next day, \u201cA dinosaur in Broad Street\u201d was the headline in the local Birmingham newspaper.<\/p>\n
Morris also bridged the worlds of art and nature through paintings such as The Jumping Three (1949), in which a trio of imaginary beings leap into the sandy-coloured sky, where bird-like creatures have gathered.<\/p>\n
From the 1940s onwards, Morris sought to create \u201ca private world of my own on canvas. It was influenced indirectly by my knowledge of biological shapes, but all my \u2018biomorphs\u2019 were invented beings.\u201d Working directly from his subconscious, with the curiosity of both a scientist and artist, he developed a distinctive visual language.<\/p>\n
His dreamlike landscapes also reflect the influence of Mir\u00f3, whom he exhibited with at the London Gallery in 1950. That same year, while still a student, he wrote and directed two short black-and-white Surrealist films, The Butterfly and the Pin and Time Flower with his future wife Ramona Baulch, whom he married in 1952. With a history degree from Oxford, she went on to work
with Morris as a researcher on his books and television programmes.<\/p>\n
While completing his doctorate and then post-doctoral research at Oxford\u2019s Department of Zoology, Morris observed animal behaviour. In 1956, he first put a pencil into the hands of Congo the chimpanzee, analysing the ape\u2019s interest in creating \u201cart for art\u2019s sake\u201d through drawing and then painting.<\/p>\n
As one of his art dealers James Mayor remembers, Morris was impressed by Congo\u2019s aesthetic sensibilities: \u201cDesmond said that Congo carefully thought out which brush and colours to use, deliberating over works, and knowing when he\u2019d finished, which is the key thing for painters.\u201d<\/p>\n
These findings led Morris to write The Biology of Art, a study of picture-making by great apes and its relationship to human art. He also exhibited a selection of Congo\u2019s paintings at London\u2019s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1957, with works from the show acquired by Pablo Picasso, Roland Penrose and the Duke of Edinburgh, among others.<\/p>\n
Morris was a collector, too, and his Oxford house was a cabinet of curiosities, crammed full of books, curios and tribal artefacts. By the time I met him in 2019, he had decorated an entire wall with African masks. He also showed me a treasured letter from Mir\u00f3, thanking him for the gift of a pre-Columbian figurine as a birthday present in 1975.<\/p>\n
Another highlight of their friendship was in 1964 when Mir\u00f3 visited Morris, who was then curator of mammals at London Zoo, and the younger man welcomed his hero by hanging a large python round his neck.<\/p>\n
Other encounters with wildlife were filmed, as Morris presented the popular TV programme Zoo Time weekly from 1956 to 1967. An engaging broadcaster, he starred alongside a giant tortoise, mating lions and a vampire bat, among other animals. It was not just broadcasting that propelled Morris to fame: in 1967, his controversial book The Naked Ape became an international bestseller.<\/p>\n
Moving to Malta, he spent the next six years painting, writing and exploring the island, where his son Jason was born. The family returned to Oxford in 1974, where Morris continued to develop his paintings of biomorphs, often taking part in strange rituals, as seen in The Arena (1976), pointing to his interest in observing human and animal behaviour.<\/p>\n
Morris felt \u201cvery lucky\u201d to have a dual career that used both sides of his brain. However, his celebrity zoologist status undoubtedly cast a shadow over his artistic output. In 1987, he published a well-illustrated book of his work, titled The Secret Surrealist.<\/p>\n
Over the course of 80 years, Morris made more than 3,000 paintings, as well as drawings and collages, often working until 4am. Just months before passing away, he told me: \u201cBeing able to work in my studio for four hours every night, making new paintings, is what is keeping me alive at the age of 97.\u201d<\/p>\n
His studio, towards the end of his life, was in County Kildare, Ireland; following Ramona\u2019s death in 2018, he wanted to live nearer Jason and his family. In 2022, alongside his granddaughter Tilly Morris and co-director Annie Laing, he opened the D\u00fan Laoghaire Institute of Visual Arts (DIVA), which houses his paintings alongside those by Mir\u00f3, Leonor Fini and, naturally, Congo.<\/p>\n
I knew Desmond Morris as a warm, curious and endlessly creative man. When I asked him, as one of the world\u2019s last living members of the original Surrealist group, what the movement still meant to him, he replied: \u201cToday it means, for me, the joy in irrational, unconscious thought processes\u2014letting my imagination run free.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Desmond John Morris, born 24 January 1928 Wiltshire, England; studied zoology at the University of Birmingham, 1948-51, doctorate in animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, 1951-54; married Ramona Baulch 1952 (one son, Jason); died Naas, County Kildare, Ireland, 19 April 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You could never have a short conversation with Desmond Morris, one of the last surviving Surrealists, who has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1057503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,290406,77,1490,86418,16,15],"class_list":["post-1057502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-design","tag-desmond-morris","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries","tag-surrealism","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1057503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}