Episode 489: Animal Artists

Further reading: https://elephantartgallery.com/blogs/meet Desmond Morris with his favorite Congo painting: Peter/Pierre Brassau and some of his paintings: The so-called donkey painting, and I described it wrong in the episode: Pockets at work: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the early days of the podcast I did an episode about animal musicians, which for a long time was my favorite episode. Today let’s visit a similar topic, animals who are visual artists. Back in the 1950s through the 60s, researchers studying how humans make art studied monkeys and apes who were taught how to use a brush and paints. The studies caught the public’s fancy and it became something of a fad to own a piece of art created by an animal—whether it was a monkey or ape, an elephant, or some other animal. One of the earliest big name animal artists was a chimpanzee named Congo. Zoologist Desmond Morris, who was studying creativity in apes and humans, and who was also an artist himself, offered Congo a pencil and paper when he was two years old in 1956. Congo enjoyed drawing and especially liked to draw circles. When Morris eventually gave the chimp paints, Congo was even more enthusiastic. But while he was considered a novelty, he only had one art exhibition while he was alive, a 1957 event arranged by Morris. It wasn’t until 2005 that th