Episode 489: Animal Artists
About this episode
This episode explores the phenomenon of animals as visual artists, focusing on historical examples like the chimpanzee Congo.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Katherine Shaw
Topics covered
- animal artists
- visual art
- chimpanzee art
- Desmond Morris
- animal creativity
Keywords
- animal art
- Congo
- Desmond Morris
- chimpanzee
- visual artists
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Congo, Peter/Pierre Brassau, the so-called donkey painting, Pockets at work
More episodes of Strange Animals Podcast
- Episode 494: Four Water Animals
- Episode 493: NEW The Mystery of Esconichthys and Friends
- Episode 492: Basilosaurids
- Episode 491: The Jumar
- Episode 490: Ipnops and Other Deep-Sea Fish
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