Congo (chimpanzee)

The chimpanzee Congo ( born in 1954, died 1964), painted at the age of two to four years in experiments of the British ethologist Desmond Morris artist and a good 400 images in abstract style. The monkey received only sign stuff, he was not guided. Congo died at the age of 10 from tuberculosis.

Background

The Malexperimente with Congo stand in a row with other behavioral biology experiments in which we investigated the physiological basis of artistic activity since the beginning of the 20th century. Already in 1913 Nadia Kohts had first hired in Moscow such experiments with chimpanzees. The pictures that ensued, were the drawings that had made her two year old son, very similar. She led these efforts continued in the 1920s. More comparative studies led Winthrop N. Kellogg through in the 1930s; they were published in the book The Ape and the Child.

Reception

The pictures painted Congo with colors and brushes were evaluated similarly by contemporaries as the abstract painting. They were compared with the technique of action painting of Jackson Pollock and the Tachism the 1940s. Desmond Morris himself wrote: "Today is the last monkey and modern man have the same interest in the production of images, one might even say. If a contemporary artist paints a picture, he has hardly more substantial reasons for this as a chimp " Others said, of a " Cézanne of the Apes world." The pictures were first shown publicly in 1957 in London in an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Another exhibition was held at the Cologne gallery Zwirner.

Congos painting came at that time still mainly on scorn and rejection, although they had been partially sold, among other things, to Herbert Read, Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso.

Well, forty years after Congos death, in June 2005, (then 21,515 euros ) were in the London auction house Bonhams three of his paintings, which had previously been estimated between 600 and 800 pounds, to 14,400 pounds bought by the American collector Howard Hong, who himself had referred to as " lovers of modern and contemporary painting."