By Andrew Heavens
April 20 (Reuters) – Desmond Morris, the British zoologist, writer and surrealist painter whose bestselling book “The Naked Ape” put humans firmly back in their place among animals, had died, the BBC reported on Monday, citing his son Jason.
Art and nature dominated his long career in equal measure, but it was that 1967 book, its sequels and his regular TV appearances that secured his reputation.
Subtitled “A zoologist’s study of the human animal”, the blurb in the first edition said it would show how our sex and social lives, gestures, emotions and habits all followed patterns “set down by … hunting-ape ancestors”.
Sales were boosted by the frisson of the title, the use of a nude man and woman in adverts, and a serialisation in the Sunday Mirror newspaper, which promised “one of the most controversial books written in our time”.
Some church and other public figures bolstered the publicity by expressing outrage over the book’s frank focus on mankind’s evolutionary makeup.
As Morris pursued his career as a writer and scientific populariser, he also built up a reputation in the more rarefied world of British Surrealism.
“I have always been two people,” Morris told artist and writer Melanie Coles in an interview for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016.
“I am an objective scientist and then I go into my studio and my other hemisphere of my brain starts to work. I become an artist and am irrational in my surrealist work.”
STICKLEBACKS AND CHIMP ART
Desmond Morris was born in the rural southwest English county of Wiltshire on January 24, 1928, the great-grandson of Victorian naturalist and newspaper owner William Morris.
At school through the 1940s, he developed his parallel fascinations in the natural world and new art movements.
He held his first solo art show in 1948, the same year he started studying zoology at the University of Birmingham. Two years later, just into his 20s, his paintings shared wall space with the works of Spanish master Joan Miró at a Surrealist exhibition at the London Gallery.
His twin interests followed him to the University of Oxford, where he met his future wife, Ramona Baulch, and worked on the reproductive behaviour of the ten-spined stickleback fish, and then of birds.
Those interests came together after he moved to London, started making films and TV shows on animal behaviour, and worked on a 1957 exhibition of drawings and paintings by chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he was later director.
In the years that followed, he served as curator of mammals at London Zoo, published scientific papers, presented TV programmes – including Granada TV’s “Zoo Time” series – and wrote books for adults and children, many co-authored by Ramona.
After the worldwide success of “The Naked Ape” – a fixture on many Britons’ bookshelves through the 1970s and ’80s – the couple moved to Malta where they had a son.
The books kept flowing over the years, including “The Human Zoo”, a study of human behaviour in cities, “Intimate Behaviour”, “Peoplewatching”, “The Naked Man” and “The Naked Woman”.
In 2022, he published a study of the art movement he had helped form, “The British Surrealists”. Later that year London’s Redfern Gallery put on an exhibition of his own work, titled “Desmond Morris: The Last Surrealist”.
(Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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