In the Fifties, Britain had its own painter to rival the abstract expressionists of New York. The star of a prime time show on ITV, he counted Pablo Picasso and the Duke of Edinburgh among his collectors. His name was Congo, and he was a chimpanzee. Two million viewers tuned into the programme Zoo Time each week to see what he could do with a paintbrush. "Congo was a celebrity," says the show's presenter, Desmond Morris. "One week, when he caught a cold and couldn't appear, we received two back-breakingly heavy sacks of Get Well cards."
Across a three-year career, Congo made 400 drawings and paintings, and Morris has decided to put up for sale the 55 he owns. These are currently on view at the Mayor Gallery in Mayfair, London.
Morris isn't expecting quite the hoopla that accompanied Congo's debut exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1957, when every work sold within 24 hours. It's true, the tabloid press were sceptical – one running the headline "Art World Gone Bananas". However, most people seemed to revel in the abstract flourishes that bore resemblance to those of the then-fashionable abstract expressionists. As Salvador Dalí quipped, "the hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock totally animal".
Where on earth did the idea come from, though, to give a paintbrush to a chimp? Was it an arty twist on infinite monkey theorem (the philosophical proposition that if a monkey sits at a typewriter long enough, it'll produce the complete works of Shakespeare)?
"No, no. It was part of a serious scientific experiment," says Morris, a successful zoologist with a PhD from Oxford. After university, he took a job at London Zoo: it was from here that he'd broadcast Zoo Time and here that he'd meet two-year-old Congo.