Remembering Desmond Morris

Desmond Morris, who has died at the age of 98, is best known as a zoologist, author and broadcaster, who presented the weekly programme Zoo Time during the 1960s. However, I knew him as one of the world’s most remarkable artists, and the last surviving member of the Surrealist movement.

Over the course of 80 years, he made more than 3000 paintings. Among them is ‘The Jumping Three’, 1949, which belongs to Birmingham Museums Trust. Speaking to him about this work, he described the uncanny figures as 'biomorphs', reflecting his interest in studying human and animal behaviour.

For Morris, science and art shouldn’t be separated. As a student at the University of Birmingham, he studied zoology and was keen to draw organisms through the lens of a microscope. He was also soon drawn into the circle of the Birmingham Surrealists, after meeting founding member Conroy Maddox in 1948.

Although the youngest of the group, which included John Melville, Robert Melville, Emmy Bridgwater and Oscar Mellor, Morris made an impression - on his fellow surrealists as well as the public.

Beyond making work on paper, Morris played with great surrealist objects and was an early inventor of installation art. Behind the zoology department at the University of Birmingham there was a rubbish dump and on it, one day, he spotted a discarded elephant’s skull:

'I decided that such an object should inspire a sense of wonder and determined to bring it to people's attention.

'It was extremely heavy and I had to enlist the aid of a number of hefty helpers, who assisted me in carrying it down the road to the nearest tram stop. The conductor refused to allow us to sit with it in the tram, insisting that it was 'luggage', and made us stow it under the stairs with a group of suitcases, where it was already beginning to take on a suitable irrelevancy.'

Arriving in the city centre, Morris left this surrealist object sitting in a shop doorway on Broad Street.

The next day, “A dinosaur in Broad Street” was the headline in the local Birmingham newspaper. 'Below it”, Morris says, “was a photograph of two policemen struggling to force a strange object through the door of a police-car.'

From the very beginning, Morris was a radical artist who wanted to shake up the establishment. Among the Birmingham group, he found artistic allies who saw themselves as opposed to the London surrealists. They believed that many of these artists were involved in the movement just for exposure. "We were truer to the ideals of the movement", said Morris.

From Birmingham, he went on to forge direct links with Paris, exhibit with Joan Miró and have work acquired by Tate.

Morris will be remembered above all for writing The Naked Ape and presenting popular TV programmes. Yet, his first and last love was Surrealism. 'Being 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', was the last thing he said to me.

Ruth Millington is a Birmingham-based art historian and author of several books including This Book Will Make You An Artist (Nosy Crow).