The Secret Surrealist: Desmond Morris

This scene is a window onto

a secret world which I created.

In a sense, I've always led a double life...

..because publicly I'm known as a scientist who studies

animal behaviour and human behaviour.

I wanted to have a look at the way in which man, the primeval hunter,

become transformed into man, the modern city dweller.

What had happened to all those ancient, primitive urges?

FADES INTO ECHO: The need for spaces, for territories...

But in private, at the same time,

I've been developing this surrealist world of paintings.

I started in 1944 to make my very first surrealist drawings

when I was still at school.

I exhibited later on with the great Spanish surrealist Joan Miro.

I became friends with the sculptor Henry Moore

and the painter Francis Bacon.

There is something inside me that wants to go on exploring

this private world that I've created.

It's completely obsessive and I can't stop.

I have three rooms in which I do most of my work.

One room is dedicated to art and other artists.

It's full of my own work, art books and monographs...

..and strange objects -

things that I've collected from other cultures that

have some special meaning for me.

There's another room that I use for the messier work.

It's the sort of workshop rather than a studio.

Then there's a room which is dedicated to my life as a zoologist

and a student of human behaviour,

but this room too is full of objects that I've come across over the years

which fascinate me and which I've collected and kept.

My daily routine, if I'm painting, is strange,

because I am a nocturnal animal.

I work at night.

I come down to my studio at ten o'clock.

My brain seems to work at its best between 10pm and 4am.

'And that six-hour period, because it's late at night,

'I don't get telephone calls, I'm uninterrupted.'

The whole world is sort of quiet

and I can disappear more easily into my...

into my secret world.

Part of my life has been involved in developing a world of biomorphs.

An alien world, a parallel world to our own,

with its own rules and regulations which I don't understand.

Sometimes it helps me to do just a very rough sketch,

which will help me to work out the relationship between the biomorphs.

What I'm doing is just working out the relationship between

a reclining figure and a standing figure.

Is this one dominant or is this the dominant one?

Is this the one reclining like a Roman emperor,

with this as a sentinel, or is this an important stranger arriving?

What's the relationship between the two?

And the ambiguity of that relationship is what makes, to me,

makes the painting interesting and keeps the interest in it going.

So, now I can dispense with that,

because it wasn't done to keep,

it was done just as a guide.

The essential thing about surrealist painting is

it always contains a mystery of some sort.

You never quite know what's going on.

You produce mysterious images

by allowing yourself to paint

without conscious intervention.

That is, without rational analysis.

I often wonder how I got started as a surrealist artist.

I've looked back at my childhood and tried to figure out how it began.

One important moment was when I went into the attic in the family house,

and in a trunk in the corner I discovered a brass microscope which

had belonged to my great-grandfather who was a Victorian naturalist.

And also an extraordinary book...

HE LAUGHS

..called the Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts Begun.

I thought, "How marvellous to write a book about something you've just begun."

It's by Nehemiah Grew.

They don't make names like that any more.

And in it I found the most amazing illustrations.

I looked at these illustrations and I thought,

"These intestines have the most beautiful shapes."

And I turned the pages and became fascinated by those shapes.

My childhood was marred first by the Depression when there was no money

and then by the Second World War.

And I took a pretty dim view of grown-ups, because it seemed to me

all they wanted to do was to kill one another.

My father, who fought in World War I,

came back from the war in such a bad way,

I think he only had half of one lung left.

I watched him die all through my childhood and he died in 1942

at the height of the Second World War, when I was only 14.

I couldn't believe it at first.

I wouldn't accept it. I thought he'd been sent to a sanitarium somewhere and they weren't telling me.

And I think this created a deep-seated anger in me.

I think I retained a hatred of the establishment as a result of that.

CLOCK TICKS

There was one terrible moment during the war

when, visually, I had a shock.

A school friend of mine was the son of a local undertaker...

..and he took me one day into the mortuary, where there were

all the bodies of soldiers who'd been blown to pieces in the war.

And there were all these entrails

and I was struck by how beautiful they were.

It left a very powerful visual impact...

..so that the shapes of internal organs

became important to me.

Now, I didn't rationalise it,

but when I look at some of my biomorphs,

I realise that that influence is still there.

I really thought human beings, as adults, were crazy.

I mean, "Why on earth did they want to kill one another?"

And, you know, the child's brain just couldn't accept this,

and I needed some sort of rebellion.

But I couldn't be a destructive rebel,

because I'd had a loving family,

so I had to become a creative rebel.

And I rebelled against anything traditional,

because tradition was related to the establishment,

which was related to this...

..killing that was going on all around me.

In the school library I found a book which had an essay by Max Ernst,

an important surrealist,

and my Christmas present that year was a box of oil paints

and I did my first oil paint...

..just before the end of 1945.

Because I work at night, I spend a lot of my time alone.

But I'm an only child, so it's not a problem for me.

I've never been lonely.

I enjoy solitude.

When I'm working here very late at night, I'm...as it were,

I'm dreaming on canvas, while other people are dreaming in their beds.

DOG BARKS

DESMOND SETS STICK DOWN

HE SIGHS

I suddenly had this idea that

this one needed this small detail,

and I had to get the balance between the two red spheres exactly right

so that the one on the left is slightly lighter than the one on the right.

This double life has been going on now for about 70 years

and ever since I was a teenager.

Far from conflicting,

having these two sides to my life actually works very well,

because each one is an escape from the other.

I was a strange teenager. HE LAUGHS

I painted my bedroom black.

When I say black, I mean everything - ceiling, walls, doors,

everything was painted black.

And then I painted brightly coloured images on the black.

And I did this to intensify my dreaming.

And one of them I did is

a huge letter to a surrealist friend of mine,

which describes my dream in great details,

and it was an interesting dream,

because in the dream I see a strange creature in the tree above the glass

roof of my studio, and I go out and I lie on the grass beneath the tree

and I look up at this strange, weird creature...

..and it falls out of the tree on top of me...

..and completely covers me.

And I close my eyes to protect myself, and then,

as I open my eyes,

I can feel the wind in my feathers,

and my claws on the branch are gripping it very tightly,

and I look down and I see this young man come out of his studio

and lie on the grass beneath me and look up at me.

In 1947, I painted a picture called Entry To A Landscape.

And this was the start of my biomorphic world.

There were two dark walls, and hanging pinned to the walls were

some horrible dead entrails.

That was the world I was living in.

And, through the crack,

I could see this beautiful blue sky and strange things moving about.

And that was the world I wanted to get into.

And I'm still exploring that world now...

..in the 21st century.

'A lot of the biomorphs have a sort of quality of being

'internal organs made external.

'It's an interesting question to ask - what are my biomorphs made of?

'Are they made of flesh, or blood, or bone?

'And...they're none of these things.

'They're their own material.'

Their habitat is canvas.

They evolve on the canvas.

Therefore, they have their own material.

They are flesh, but they're not flesh.

They have bones, but they're not bones.

They belong in a different dimension.

I did warn you that this is very slow work,

because I'm still...

..demanding that I am fairly meticulous

with the details of my biomorphs.

And, in order to keep my hand steady, I use this stick.

It's, erm, it just makes the hand that much steadier.

I could do it without, but...

..why not use an aid if you can?

Now, let's see. That's...

Yeah, that's about right.

This is the only time in 70 years of painting

that anybody's ever seen me paint.

I've never painted in anybody's presence before.

This is very strange.

HE GRUNTS

When World War II ended, I was conscripted into the Army,

because conscription continued after the war.

Then when I came out of the Army, I had to decide what to do.

And since the kind of painting I was doing was hated universally,

when I had my first exhibition in 1948

there were angry letters to the local press

saying that all these filthy works should be burned in a furnace.

And, of course, nothing was sold,

so I had to decide what to do.

And I thought, "The only thing I can do is to follow my other passion,

"studying animal behaviour."

So, I went off and did a degree in zoology

and became a professional zoologist, but never stopped painting.

When I arrived at Birmingham University,

I was very lucky because I discovered that

there was a surrealist group active in Birmingham at the time.

And we still had all those marvellous surrealist meetings

at which we all argued furiously.

The surrealist movement was very strange.

It was supposed to be irrational, drawn from the world of dreams,

but it was also rigidly bound by rules that had been formulated

years before by the so-called Pope of Surrealism, Andre Breton.

So, of course there were endless arguments.

We argued about politics and we argued about techniques.

We argued about who was truly surrealist and who wasn't.

And in 1950 when I was - what? 22, I decided to make a surrealist film.

MUSIC: Scythian Suite, Op 20 by Sergei Prokofiev

I'd seen Chien Andalou,

the famous Salvador Dali film that he made with Bunuel,

and I was deeply impressed by the irrational images

and I thought, "I'll make my own Chien Andalou," and I did.

The young man and the young woman

are of course played by myself and my wife Ramona.

The film starts out out in the countryside

and then she's running from him

and he chases after her, and as he chases after her,

so we see their thoughts.

And in his thoughts he enters a strange room

in which all kinds of weird things happen to him.

And now we go inside the mind of the girl.

We see her private world

and she receives strange messages on a telephone.

And one of the instructions is

to place two ripe plums in the eye sockets of the skull of a horse...

..as you do. HE LAUGHS

This was the sort of imagery that I was playing with

and I was having great fun doing it.

The mechanics of painting is quite boring

and when you have the idea of the image,

you've then got to actually execute it

and it involves many hours of just tiny adjustments

to get the shape exactly the way you want it.

A friend of mine went into a room

where Magritte was painting a picture, and as he entered the room

he heard Magritte saying,

"Boring, boring, boring!

"What on earth are you doing?"

And, of course, Magritte's surrealism consisted of a...

..a bizarre idea, which he would have,

but then once he'd had that bizarre idea,

like having a human figure with an apple where a face should be,

for example, then he was faced with a long and, to him, very boring process

of actually painting it. HE LAUGHS

And I've always said if ever I got bored with the meticulous side of

producing these pictures, I would stop...

..and not paint any more.

It hasn't happened yet.

No, that's not right.

HE LAUGHS

All of this time, as I studied zoology, I continued my secret surrealist life.

In 1950 I had my second exhibition showing in the same London gallery

as the Spanish surrealist Joan Miro.

But he sold none of his paintings and I only sold two of mine.

Mine were much cheaper than his, of course.

The third and final exhibition occurred two years later

at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

and after that, with nothing selling,

I finally gave up trying to paint for anybody other than myself.

I don't suppose anybody else would appreciate the subtle differences

that I'm worried about, but I have to get it right for myself,

cos I paint for myself.

'As the '50s passed, my career as a zoologist took off.

'I worked at London Zoo,'

where I conducted experiments with a chimpanzee called Congo.

I wanted to show that the artistic impulse wasn't just a human one.

The experiments attracted a huge amount of interest.

And we held an exhibition of Congo's work in London at the ICA.

My old friend Joan Miro came to visit me at the zoo.

He wanted one of Congo's paintings and he told me that Picasso was also

fascinated by Congo's work, and then

when a journalist told him Congo's paintings couldn't possibly be art,

Picasso bit him.

That's surrealism for you.

All this trouble over a little blob. HE LAUGHS

I never stopped painting.

I always made sure that I had a studio.

And then in the '60s I wrote a bestselling book

and found myself, for the first time in my life, with lots of money.

So, I took several years off and devoted myself to painting.

In the 1970s,

I had enough time to be able to

do some very complicated

biomorphic landscapes.

These have remained my favourite works, I think, from my entire

70 years of painting.

The biomorphs have become extremely complicated.

I was exploring them rather like a Victorian naturalist

going to some unknown island.

I have no illusions.

I think of myself as a minor surrealist, but a serious one.

Recently, in a book devoted to human artistic activity,

I wrote a chapter on the history of surrealism.

'But, of course, I left myself out.

'But the final irony is that as one of the last living true surrealists,

'I've become collectable.'

I have pictures in the Tate and in private collections here in Britain

and in museums all over the world.

Perhaps my favourite recent work is a picture called The Gathering.

It hangs in a private house in Palma, Majorca,

in a house that has medieval roots.

MUSIC: Violin Sonata No 3 in C Major by Johann Sebastian Bach

The owners revealed it to their friends

with a violinist playing Bach sonatas.

It's a triptych, the largest work I've ever painted, and on its

three panels are gathered together the biomorphs that have populated my

surrealist canvases ever since 1947.

They've come together once again

for some sort of irrational, unreasonable, dreamlike ceremony.

And even I don't know what it means.

Because, of course, this is all coming from my unconscious, and...

and it's dark inside my head.

What do any of my paintings mean?

What sort of secret world have I created?

'It's almost as though the biomorphs paint themselves

'and I'm simply the observer.'

Time, I think, to call it a night.

But I'll be back tomorrow.