Apes With an Oeuvre
By FRANS B.M. de WAAL
Why do people all over the world produce and enjoy art? What drives them to devote time and energy to an activity that earns only a few individuals significant amounts of money and fame? Is making art some kind of play, a form of exploration, a way of impressing others? The answers are still unclear, but looking at drawings and paintings by apes, our close relatives, may help us to understand our own artistic impulses.
What apes do with brushes and crayons is far removed from unintentional animal "art," such as that produced by a donkey's tail dipped in paint, or by a rooster in a famous case in Japan in 1806. The artist Hokusai dipped the rooster's feet in red paint and made it walk across a long scroll he had unrolled on the ground and covered with big blue loops of paint. To the Japanese eye, the result looked like a painting of red maple leaves floating on a river.
Apes, however, can deliberately make what looks like art to humans. In the 1920s, Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts studied the perception of shape and color in her young chimpanzee, Yoni, and watched him enthusiastically draw with pencils on paper. Experiments on ape art were also conducted in the 1940s at the Yerkes Laboratories, in Florida, by Paul Schiller, who pioneered a simple test: He marked pieces of paper with lines or shapes and gave them to a chimpanzee, Alpha, to see what she would do with them. Alpha didn't simply splash paint randomly, but carefully heeded the markings, incorporating them in the end product. If Schiller put marks in three of a paper's corners, for example, Alpha would invariably scribble a mark in the fourth corner.
But the full extent of ape art became known only after an ethologist who was also an artist began to pay attention, in the 1950s.
Author of one of the best-selling popular books on science, The Naked Ape, as well as many other works, Desmond Morris has been a pioneer of the burgeoning genre of literature that compares human and animal behavior. He has proposed many provocative ideas -- that human talk serves the same function as primate grooming, for instance, and that the invention of marriage was a necessary step when our forebears began to hunt in groups, because it helped regulate male competition. Perhaps because some scientists consider him a mere vulgarizer, they have elevated his ideas to theory without so much as a nod to the author who inspired them. Morris started his career as a serious and respected ethologist, however, training at Oxford under a scholar no less renowned than Niko Tinbergen.
Morris is also a surrealist painter, in a style reminiscent of Miro. Art may even be his first love, and his paintings have been featured in several illustrated books and at major exhibitions. It was his sensitivity to art, combined with his opportunity as a zoologist to interact with Congo, a young chimpanzee, that provided him with rare insights into the nature of the artistic impulse.
Congo became a regular guest on Morris's television show, Zootime, and reached fame with an exhibition of his work in 1957. His paintings were not merely a curiosity: They were widely recognized as beautiful. Congo had a refreshingly energetic style, and he seemed to strive for symmetrical coverage, rhythmical variations, and eye-catching contrasts of color.
Congo always stayed within the borders of the paper, and created rudimentary compositions, such as a heavy dot surrounded by bold circular strokes, or a fan-shaped widening of lines. His art was considered to be beyond the level of that of a young child, in terms of both composition and boldness. The latter may have been due to the fact that chimpanzees are stronger and have better motor control than young children. Their paintings immediately strike us as forceful statements, whereas a young child's art tends to look tentative.
Picasso hung a Congo on his wall. The paintings of other apes -- one of whom was given the name Pierre Brassou, to trick art critics -- have been accorded serious, sometimes glowing, reviews by experts who, unlike Picasso, thought that the artists were humans.
One illustration of the power of ape art is how hard it is to emulate. Thierry Lenain, a Belgian philosopher of art, recounted in Monkey Painting how an Austrian painter, Arnulf Rainer, tried to copy every move and brush stroke of a chimpanzee in 1979. He squatted next to the ape, hoping to produce works of the same clarity and intensity. The human painter, however, evidently had the preconceived notion that apes are wild creatures, devoid of emotional control. As a result, instead of imitating the ape, Rainer painted the way he thought an ape would paint. But he had it all wrong: Apes can be as concentrated and controlled as people. As Lenain's account of a filmed session shows, it was the human painter who got too wild for the ape's taste:
"We see [Rainer] in the grip of a kind of trance, banging the paper, spitting on it, waving his brush nervously, throwing it down. The chimpanzee by contrast paints peacefully to start with, but is gradually influenced by the agitation of its imitator. It stops drawing, starts jumping about energetically and chases Rainer across the room. ... Painting is not a violent activity for chimpanzees."
If the ape's owner had not put an end to his chimp's pursuit of Rainer, the human painter might have learned that an ape, even a young and relatively small one, has the muscular strength of several grown men bundled into one. Hence, an ape can charge a painting with energy and rhythm with far less effort than a person can.
In addition, ape painters don't follow the rules that human artists do. Instead of worrying about the cumulative impact of an entire series of brush strokes and dabs, apes give the impression of taking a kinesthetic and visual pleasure in each separate action. We don't know the aesthetic secrets of the chimpanzee that Rainer tried to imitate, but the fact is that the human painter failed miserably in his attempt to achieve the ape's directness and sovereignty of expression. When Lenain examined 15 simultaneously produced works by ape and human, he concluded that "[t]he chimpanzee's compositions are straightforward and clear. The imitations, on the other hand, are fuzzy, tangled webs of lines, completely illegible, almost to the point of hysteria."
The title of the English translation of Lenain's book -- Monkey Painting -- is unfortunate because, apart from a capuchin monkey named Pablo, all major non-human primate artists have been apes. But the book contains an intriguing theory of primate art that is dramatically different from the ideas of Desmond Morris, who emphasizes the similarities between ape and human. Lenain stresses the differences, and looks at ape art as a form of visual disruption. He believes that the painting ape disrupts the empty white space in front of him or her, testing and probing, and ultimately destroying what existed before. In contrast, Morris recognizes a sense of aesthetic order and balance in the works of apes.
Morris's art-as-order hypothesis has some major points in its favor. First of all, as he demonstrated, apes do seek a balanced and orderly arrangement in their paintings. Following Paul Schiller's lead, Morris would place a mark off center -- say, to the left -- and give the paper to Congo. The chimpanzee would then balance the composition by painting on the right side of the paper. He was not simply attracted to the empty space there, because the closer Morris placed his mark to the center of the page, the closer to the center on the other side Congo painted; and the farther to the left Morris put the mark, the farther to the right Congo worked, to keep the painting symmetrical.
Another indication that apes do not just make disruptive marks comes from the fact that they have a sense of when a painting is completed, despite what some early observers claimed. They argued that ape paintings were actually a human product: Apes happily paint away until the product starts to look like a piece of abstract art to the people around it, who then take it away from the ape and hang it in a gallery. This would mean that the art is all in the human eye -- that an ape has no conception of a finished product.
But coming between an ape and his or her work can be dangerous. There are many stories of apes' vehemently objecting to interruptions before they have finished their paintings. For example, Bella, a chimpanzee at the Amsterdam Zoo, painted with great concentration and was generally peaceful -- but she lost her temper one day, when her keeper tried to remove her materials in the midst of her artistic activity. Morris also reported that Congo became greatly annoyed if he saw that a painting on which he was still working was about to be removed; nor did Congo like to be urged to continue once he had put down his brush, indicating that he was done. One day, Morris managed to take away a painting of an incomplete fan shape. When Congo got it back a while later, he simply continued where he had left off, carefully finishing the pattern.
Another telling experience is that of Lucien Tessarolo, a French painter, who used to work side by side with a female chimpanzee, Kunda, on a canvas that both of them would sign at the end -- Tessarolo with a signature, Kunda with a handprint. Tessarolo was impressed by Kunda's precision and choice of harmonious colors. The ape didn't always appreciate the figurative elements that he added to their work, however. Sometimes Kunda reacted enthusiastically, but on occasion she rubbed out Tessarolo's contributions and waited for him to come up with something else.
That doesn't sound like an ape seeking to disrupt order. Underlying Kunda's behavior must have been a sense of how the completed product should look. I am not saying that apes value finished paintings, or that they never destroy their creations. Indeed, as soon as the production phase is over, apes have been known to tear their works to shreds. On other occasions, they have exhibited an indifference to their finished paintings that humans find hard to understand. In that way, the apes are very different from human artists: Their goal is not to create an enduring visual image that will please, inspire, provoke, shock, or produce whatever effect it is that the human painter seeks to achieve.
The evidence, then, is that painting apes have a sense of both balance and completeness, enjoy the visual effect of what they do, create regularities and patterns, but are not out to produce an oeuvre that stands the test of time. As far as they are concerned, the product can be destroyed or thrown away once they are done with it. So, even though their artistic activity is best described as the deliberate creation of visually pleasing patterns, rather than as a form of disruption, it differs fundamentally from human art in that it does not appear to be a means to an end.
Some people feel that calling what apes produce "art" mocks human achievements. We humans do not take other primates seriously, and have a long history of using them as caricatures of ourselves. A genre of art lasting several centuries revolved around the monkey as artist, depicting capuchins or macaques sitting behind an easel, paintbrush ready, staring at a female nude or still life just as a human painter would. Whether those paintings were a commentary on the slavish copying by some human artists, or self-mockery by the painters, the underlying message was that of opposition between animal and art. If art is by definition a human domain, a monkey with a paintbrush can only be a joke.
The age-old "monkey artist" theme had to pop up, of course, when ape paintings became an issue in the 1950s. One famous chimpanzee artist, Baltimore Betsy, was customarily photographed in front of her work with captions such as: "Just a little something I dashed off, but not bad." Such catering to the public's sense of humor undermined any attempt to explain what is interesting about ape paintings.
Moreover, apes came in handy in a cultural war zone during that era concerning gestural art and action painting -- the schools of art closest to that of the apes. Those approaches were characterized by abstract works that included vigorous, dynamic brush strokes and random spills and drips. Ape art became a weapon against such art, with its critics expostulating that, if an ape can do what certain human artists do, then the humans must be operating at a rather primitive level. Salvador Dali, for example, couldn't resist making the following jab at another painter: "The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock is almost animal."
Some people accused Desmond Morris of trying to ridicule modern art, but that was never his goal. He simply wanted to show that we are not the only species to take pleasure in creating visual effects, and thus that the aesthetic sense probably has far older roots than many of us assume.
The main dividing line between ape and human art is representation. In spite of isolated claims of apes' producing recognizable images, human art seems to be unique in its ability to depict the reality that surrounds us. Observing that the human child moves on to representations after an abstract phase, Morris and his wife, Ramona, concluded in Men and Apes that "unhappily this is the point at which the apes get stuck."
Yet, even if substantial differences between human and ape art remain, they should not distract us from the undeniable common ground. Obviously, we feel that there is more to our art than enjoyment of visual effects: The human artist imagines and strives for an end product. Human art is a conscious act of creation. On the other hand, without the satisfaction derived from intermediate stages -- from the activity itself and its immediate results -- we might never have reached this point. It is in that regard that ape art, rather than insulting the human ego, provides a glimpse of the wellspring of our species' universal artistic impulse.
Frans B.M. de Waal is a professor of psychology and director of the Living Links Center at Emory University. He writes regularly for The Chronicle.
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Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B6
