Desmond Morris's Final Book Asks Why Surrealists Couldn't Stop Painting Animals
A zoologist who spent his life studying animal behaviour — and painting alongside surrealists — left behind one last book about why artists like Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington filled their canvases with creatures. Desmond Morris's The Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts & Fantastic Visions, published by Thames & Hudson, is scheduled for release in September 2026.
Morris, who died in April 2026 at age 98, was the rare figure who held two careers simultaneously: a renowned zoologist and a surrealist painter himself. His 1967 bestseller The Naked Ape examined human beings through the lens of animal behaviour, and he spent decades pursuing both passions in parallel, according to The Guardian. The New York Times, which reported his death, noted that he also authored The British Surrealists, reviewed by the paper in June 2022.
The Surrealist Menagerie is Morris's final book with Thames & Hudson, according to the publisher's tribute page. His son Jason paid tribute to him there following his death.
The book explores how animals shaped the surrealist imagination — a subject Morris was uniquely positioned to write about, given that he understood both the biology of animal behaviour and the mechanics of surrealist art from the inside. Thames & Hudson describes him as a bestselling author, surrealist painter, and renowned zoologist on its contributor page.
A review published on 28 August 2026 by Artnews (via Art in America) examines the book's central question: why surrealists turned to animals to plumb the human psyche. The review touches on Kahlo, Carrington, and other artists who used animal imagery — the mantis, the cat, the horse — to probe subconscious fears and desires.
Surrealism, the early-20th-century art movement that sought to channel the unconscious mind, drew heavily on dream logic and unexpected juxtapositions. Animals were natural territory: they could stand in for instincts humans preferred not to name.
What makes The Surrealist Menagerie unusual is the author behind it. Morris was not an art historian writing about surrealism from the outside. He was a practising surrealist painter who also happened to be one of the most widely read zoologists of the 20th century. The book carries both sensibilities — the scientist's eye for pattern and behaviour, and the artist's feel for image and instinct.
For readers who know Morris only from The Naked Ape, the book offers a different facet of the same mind: a lifelong fascination with why living things — human or otherwise — behave the way they do, and how artists translate that behaviour into paint.
