Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates.
Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró.
In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism. Bringing his background in animal biology to bear, Morris holds nothing back when it comes to his subjects’ bestial urges. It’s their unbridled sex lives, not their paintings, that interest him.
The artists are ordered alphabetically — such that on the first page of the first entry we read how Eileen Agar enjoyed the challenge of ‘making love standing up in a hammock’.
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