15.
A Monkey Painter
Avantgarde Artist Pierre Brassau
In 1964 an art exhibition was held in the Swedish city of Goteborg. The work of previously unknown French painter, Pierre Brassau, attracted much attention. Art critic Rolf Anderberg wrote in the morning Posten: "Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes but also with clean determination. His brush strokes twist with a furious fastidiousness on the canvas ... Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." One private collector bought Brassau's paintings.
Pierre Brassau turned out to be an ape.
Two pranksters, Ake Axelsson (a journalist) and Yngve Funkegard (an artist) gave a brush and paints to the chimp, named Peter, from local Boras zoo. The ape took to art like duck to water. The pranksters hung his work in a gallery under the brush name of Pierre Brassau.
When the hoax was revealed, art critic Anderberg still insisted that Pierre's work, was the best painting in the exhibition. Not everyone was fooled by the monkey work however. Another art critic wrote: "Only an ape could have done this."
During the late 1950s biologists began to study the nature of art in humans. Of the theories proposed few had such a striking effect as those based on observations of primate paintings, hundreds of which were cataloged by Desmond Morris. Morris took these canvas paintings to indicate an intrinsic motivation for abstract creativity, expressed through an exploration of the visual field and color. Surprisingly, many of these painters progressed over time by expanding or contracting the area of paint coverage, the horizontal/vertical stroke relationships and even the development of content among those taught some English vocabulary.
Monkey paintings were exhibited in many modern art museums and experienced a fad following in the early 1960s. Thats when the cultural and scientific interest in monkey painting peaked.
Pierre Brassau turned out to be an ape.
Two pranksters, Ake Axelsson (a journalist) and Yngve Funkegard (an artist) gave a brush and paints to the chimp, named Peter, from local Boras zoo. The ape took to art like duck to water. The pranksters hung his work in a gallery under the brush name of Pierre Brassau.
When the hoax was revealed, art critic Anderberg still insisted that Pierre's work, was the best painting in the exhibition. Not everyone was fooled by the monkey work however. Another art critic wrote: "Only an ape could have done this."
During the late 1950s biologists began to study the nature of art in humans. Of the theories proposed few had such a striking effect as those based on observations of primate paintings, hundreds of which were cataloged by Desmond Morris. Morris took these canvas paintings to indicate an intrinsic motivation for abstract creativity, expressed through an exploration of the visual field and color. Surprisingly, many of these painters progressed over time by expanding or contracting the area of paint coverage, the horizontal/vertical stroke relationships and even the development of content among those taught some English vocabulary.
Monkey paintings were exhibited in many modern art museums and experienced a fad following in the early 1960s. Thats when the cultural and scientific interest in monkey painting peaked.
If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
—Will Cuppy
