![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/images-9.jpeg?w=183\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tMorris\u2019s book focuses only on the representation of real animals; cataloguing mythic and hybrid creatures would take another volume entirely. He identifies over 750 instances of animals featured in Surrealist artworks, 168 of which are pictured in\u00a0The Surrealist Menagerie.<\/em>\u00a0The book is organized into sections ranging from broad categories (\u201cThe Invertebrates\u201d) to the surprisingly specific (\u201cThe Elephants\u201d).<\/p>\n \n\tMorris\u2019s career was dedicated to demonstrating that humans have more in common with the rest of the animal kingdom than we tend to admit. In 1967, he made claims to humans\u2019 apelike nature in his bestselling work of popular science,\u00a0The Naked Ape.<\/em>\u00a0That book and subsequent publications stirred controversy as he doubled down on our essential animality as a species (and on some decidedly human, decidedly dated sexual politics).<\/p>\n \n\tWith his final book, however, Morris refuses to draw conclusions, letting the ambiguity of Surrealists\u2019 meanings stand. He wrote elsewhere that \u201cSurrealists dislike having their work analysed.\u201d In place of analysis,\u00a0The Surrealist Menagerie<\/em>\u00a0provides a panoply of alternately delightful and disturbing creatures, generating unexpected pairings through its focus on the animal. An owl crouching at the base of\u00a0Max Ernst\u2019sMarlene (Woman and Child),<\/em>\u00a01941, finds a fellow in\u00a0Morris Grave\u2019sLittle-Known Bird of the Inner Eye<\/em>\u00a0(1941), works made in the same year but that may not otherwise have been considered together. Both artists, Morris points out, were working in the context of World War II, and the owl\u2019s ability to both burrow and take flight may have appealed to feelings of entrapment and a desire to escape.\u00a0Salvador Dali\u00a0dominates the volume, as he often does in discussions of Surrealism, with 33 featured works, but there are a number of lesser-known and women artists included, especially the work of\u00a0Leonora Carrington.<\/p>\n \n\tArt historians have been less reticent to assign meaning to the zoological Surreal.\u00a0Kirsten Strom\u00a0suggests that all the animal references point to the latent influence of Darwin, whose work dissolved perceived boundaries between the human and the animal and would prompt Freud to develop his own theory of psychic evolution. Animals could offer liberatory models to throw off bourgeois conventions, returning Surrealists to primal ways of being. Ernst, who once declared himself born from an egg his mother had laid in an eagle\u2019s nest, used birds as totemic animals, appearing as an avian avatar in works like\u00a0Loplop Introduces Loplop<\/em>\u00a0(1930). Other Surrealists, meanwhile, seemed to take from animals a license to exploit other (generally female) bodies, as in\u00a0Clovis Trouille\u2019sJustine<\/em>(1937), in which both a naked female figure and a lion are bound and captive. The Surrealists were not a univocal movement, and it is striking the degree to which female artists were more likely to represent hybrid identification with their animal selves:\u00a0Frida Kahlo\u00a0appears intertwined with monkeys or as a wounded deer,\u00a0Leonor Fini\u00a0painted women cozied up with cats, and\u00a0Carrington\u2019s\u00a0scenes imagine convenings with ferrets and foxes.<\/p>\n \n\tCarrington in particular models what some have termed an ecofeminist approach, one that does not appropriate animals for the artist\u2019s own self-revelation but instead develops kinship across species. Carrington\u2019s association with a hyena in\u00a0Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)<\/em>\u00a0(ca. 1937\u201338) and her personal relationship to horses are well documented but, through her writing, Carrington makes clear that her aspirations go beyond the autobiographical. In her 1974 novel\u00a0The Hearing Trumpet,<\/em>\u00a0a nonagenarian vegetarian heroine named Marian rebels against patriarchal institutions. Navigating a changing climate, Marian develops interspecies alliances on a quest for the holy grail. Ultimately, she envisions a planet populated with cats, werewolves, bees, and goats, hoping for \u201can improvement on humanity.\u201d In the work of the female Surrealist, it is women\u2019s solidarity with animals that creates the possibility for a more humane world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/surrealists-animals-menagerie-desmond-morris-frida-kahlo-leonora-carrington-1234796000\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Surrealist_p209.jpg?w=1024″] Starfish, scorpions, swallows, and sheep\u2014once you look, animals are everywhere in Surrealist paintings. These and many other creatures are the focus of\u00a0Desmond Morris\u2019sThe Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts & Fantastic Visions,\u00a0a new book that combines Morris\u2019s longtime study of zoology (he had a doctorate from Oxford) with his own participation in the Surrealist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2116486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2116486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2116486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2116486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2116486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Surrealist_p28.jpg?w=400\")
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