Desmond Morris's Two Spheres

Article Frontispiece. Desmond Morris, The Budding Force, 16 × 12 in, oil on canvas, 1973. Morris's fascination with the biology and evolution of reproductive organs has often manifested itself in his surrealist paintings.

© Desmond Morris

What is the value of artistic practices, techniques, inventions, aesthetics and knowledge for the working scientist? What is the value of scientific practices, techniques, inventions, aesthetics and knowledge for the artist? When does art become science and science, art? Can an individual excel at both science and art, or is even a passing familiarity with one sufficient to influence the other significantly? Guest editor Robert Root-Bernstein continues the exploration of such questions in the second installment of the Leonardo special project "ArtScience: The Essential Connection."

Interested authors: please send proposals, queries and/or manuscripts to the Leonardo Editorial Office: <isast@leonardo.info>. Additional information available on the Leonardo web site: <www.leonardo.info>.

Desmond Morris (b. 1928) is best known to the public as an Oxford University zoologist and anthropologist who has written such classics as The Naked Ape and Manwatching and has produced innumerable public television science programs on everything from sex to understanding one's cat. He has, however, been a painter for longer than he has been either a scientist or a writer. Morris began painting at the age of 16, when he discovered a book of modern art that gave him the revelatory idea that art need not be the boring representation of things seen that had so far comprised his limited classroom knowledge of the subject. Art, he was surprised to learn, might also explore expressions of processes, emotions, things imagined and things hidden. Two other sources particularly stimulated his imagination. One was a book of anatomical drawings that contained stunning illustrations of internal organs such as the intestines, whose loopy, convoluted structures fascinated the young man. Another influence was surrealism, especially the works of Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. Add a naturalist to a surrealist and the result is something uniquely Morris.

One does not, of course, go to one's local art school and say, "I'd like to major in naturalistic surrealism, please. Where do I sign up?" Morris is largely self-trained and self-reliant, having overcome the objections of nearly everyone who saw his early idiosyncratic, nonrepresentational work. He painted because he felt compelled to paint. His limited skill provided an unexpected opportunity when he was drafted for military duty in 1947 at the age of 19. The army was looking for people to teach art to military men. Morris volunteered. Quite unprepared, he had to formalize his limited knowledge on the job. The experience taught him that the best way to learn anything is to teach it, a lesson he has employed throughout his life. It also convinced him that his future might lie in the art world. In his autobiography, Morris writes,

I . . . toyed with the idea of going to art school, to learn from others more efficiently what I had supposedly been teaching for the past year. But at the time, in the late 1940s, the art schools were dead places, and the idea of endless drawings of nudes and still lifes did not appeal to me [1].

Instead of attending art school, Morris took a fruitful detour. His other love was animals, particularly animal behavior. As a child he had spent innumerable hours simply watching mammals, fish, birds and insects go about their lives. So he decided to go to Oxford to work with Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen and become a naturalist. Art was still in the picture, however. "What I was always coming back to in my paintings," he wrote many years later, "were shapes based on organisms, and I argued that three years of drawing from the microscope would be the best art school in the world for me" [2]. His unusual training paid off early. At the age of 21, he exhibited in a joint show with Joan Miró, the great Spanish surrealist.

Surrealism is at the core of both art and science for Morris. "The table of surrealism," he...