Paintings by famed chimp to go on sale

Congo the chimpanzee learned to draw at two years old when his owner, artist and ethologist Desmond Morris, gave him a pencil and a piece of card. He soon noticed that the ape could draw a circle and had a basic sense of composition. Congo made around 400 artworks during his lifetime, and rose to fame in the late 1950s as the star of British TV show Zootime.

A painting by Congo

His abstract, expressionist paintings have previously caught the interest of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. And now Desmond is selling his collection of the chimp's artworks at London's Mayor Gallery. The 55 paintings, which will be priced between £1,500 ($1,850) and £6,000 each ($7,400), will be on view from December 3 through 19.

From artnet:

"No other apes were controlling the mark making and varying the patterns as he was,” Morris explains in a statement. "I originally picked Congo out as one of the more boisterous at the zoo and felt that his strong personality would respond well to focused periods of working together."

What started out as scribbly lines and splotches of paint soon turned into carefully crafted compositions that demonstrated a formal logic without having an obvious analog to the real world. Just as Pollack, de Kooning, and Kline were exploring the limits of pictorial abstraction, so too was a three-year-old chimpanzee.

Congo died at ten years of age in 1964 after suffering from tuberculosis.