Congo (chimpanzee)

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One of Congo's pictures.
Another picture by Congo (around 1957)

The chimpanzee Congo (* 1954, † 1964) painted a good 400 abstract- style pictures when he was two to four years old in experiments by the British behavioral scientist and artist Desmond Morris . The monkey received only drawing material, he was not instructed. Congo died of tuberculosis at the age of 10 .

background

The painting experiments with Congo are in line with other behavioral experiments in which the physiological foundations of artistic activity have been researched since the beginning of the 20th century. Nadia Kohts first made such experiments with chimpanzees in Moscow in 1913 . The pictures that were taken were very similar to the drawings her two-year-old son had made. She continued these attempts in the 1920s. Winthrop N. Kellogg carried out further comparative studies in the 1930s; they were published in the work The Ape and the Child .

reception

The pictures that Congo painted with paints and brushes were judged by contemporaries to be similar to abstract painting. They were compared with the technique of action painting of Jackson Pollock and the Tachism 1940s. Desmond Morris himself wrote: "Today the last ape and modern man have the same interest in the production of pictures, one could even say that if a contemporary artist paints a picture, he has little more substantial reasons than a chimpanzee." Others spoke from a "Cézanne of the ape world". The pictures were first shown publicly in 1957 in an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Another exhibition took place in the Zwirner gallery in Cologne.

At that time, Congo's paintings still met with scorn and rejection, although some of them had been sold to, among others, Herbert Read , Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso .

Forty years after Congo's death in June 2005, three of his paintings, which had previously been valued at between £ 600 and £ 800  , were auctioned at Bonhams’s London auction house for £ 14,400 (then 21,515 euros) by the American collector Howard Hong, who himself as a "lover of modern and contemporary painting".

See also

literature

  • Desmond Morris: The story of Congo . BT Batsford Ltd., London 1958.
  • Desmond Morris: The painting monkey. On the biology of art. A contribution to the investigation of pictorial behavior in great apes and to basic research in art . With a foreword by Bernhard Rensch. (Original title: The Biology of Art. A study of the Picture-Making Behavior of the Great Apes and Its Relationship to Human Art . Translated by Hans Georg Lenze). dtv 517. Munich. 1967 (License from Rauch Verlag. Düsseldorf. 1963).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e monkey painting: Art of Congo . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1963 ( online ). , Pp. 62-64.
  2. ↑ The studies were published in: Nadja Kohts: Infant Ape and Human Child. Instincts, Emotions Play, Habits . 2 vols. Moscow. 1935. - Quoted from: Ingeborg Reichle: From the origin of pictures and the beginnings of art. On the logic of the intercultural comparison of images around 1900. In: Martina Baleva, Ingeborg Reichle and Oliver Lerone Schultz (eds.): IMAGE MATCH. Visual transfer, "imagescapes" and intervisuality in global image cultures . Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich. 2012. pp. 131-150, 149.
  3. ↑ Ingeborg Reichle: From the origin of images and the beginnings of art. On the logic of the intercultural comparison of images around 1900. In: Martina Baleva, Ingeborg Reichle and Oliver Lerone Schultz (eds.): IMAGE MATCH. Visual transfer, "imagescapes" and intervisuality in global image cultures . Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich. 2012. pp. 131-150, 149.
  4. ↑ a b Art auction: Painting of a chimpanzee sells for £ 14,000 . In: Spiegel online. June 20, 2005. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
  5. ^ Desmond Morris: Paintings by Chimpanzees . Exhibition catalog. Institute of Contemporary Arts. London. 1957. - Quoted from: Ingeborg Reichle: From the origin of pictures and the beginnings of art. On the logic of the intercultural comparison of images around 1900. In: Martina Baleva, Ingeborg Reichle and Oliver Lerone Schultz (eds.): IMAGE MATCH. Visual transfer, "imagescapes" and intervisuality in global image cultures . Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich. 2012. pp. 131-150, 149.
  6. ↑ Sam Jones: Chimp's art fetches £ 14,000 . In: The Guardian. June 21, 2005. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
  7. ^ Robert Siegel: No Chump Change for Chimp Art . Interview with Howard Hong in: NPR. All Things Considered . June 21, 2005. Retrieved March 23, 2014.