Humans Are Not The Only Animals That Make Art. Other Animals Are Creative Too

The artistic prowess of this chimp was discovered by Desmond Morris, a zoologist and surrealist artist who took Congo under his wing from 1956 to 1959. During their time together, Congo produced around 400 drawings and 70 paintings, using pastels, charcoal, and paint. 

Congo wasn’t alone in the project, but he was the only one of the chimps Morris studied that showed the same interest in creating art for the sake of it.

Morris believed that, “It is the work of Congo, not that of the prehistoric cave artists, that can truly be said to represent the birth of art,” as noted by The Mayor Gallery. It seems fitting, then, that Congo’s pieces were exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1957 and snapped up by collectors including Pablo Picasso, Roland Penrose, and Herbert Read.

What is art?

It feels like one of those philosophical questions: If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer depends on your definition of sound. The same is true when we ask “do animals make art?”. It depends on your definition of art.

“For me one of the attractions of this subject is that this is unanswerable – both because you can never truly know the intentions behind what another animal is doing but also because the idea of what is ‘art’ or not is still contested in relation to what people do, never mind animals,” Will Tuck, an artist who co-curated “Art By Animals” at the University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology in 2012, told IFLScience. 

“I come from an art background and knew about the historical interest that Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists had in paintings by animals.”

“Higher primates had been the main subject of interest for artists [up to now] but we thought that by widening the scope of species we might come to a better understanding of what was, wasn’t, or may be, artistic. We wanted to concentrate on species that it could be argued might be showing independent creative engagement.”

The show featured some of Congo’s work alongside pieces by other species, including elephants, orangutans, and other chimps. 

As Museum Manager Jack Ashby said in a statement at the time, there were some notable differences between the species’ styles, as “While individual elephants are trained to always paint the same thing, art produced by apes is a lot more creative and is undistinguishable from abstract art by humans that use similar techniques.”

Toddlers vs chimpanzees

They say art is subjective, and it seems the same is true of its definition. Look up “art” in different dictionaries, and you’ll find varying definitions. For Tuck, the question of what qualifies as art applies not just across species but also to humans at different stages of life.

Something I found fascinating working with the Tallinn chimps was that with both animals there seemed to be an idea of the drawing being ‘finished’ – once it reached a certain level of working, they wouldn’t return to it.

Will Tuck

“I would say that most modern definitions of art involve an understanding on the part of the creator of a wider context that the work exists in and an expectation of a viewer of the work, and neither of these is the case with animal art,” he said. 

“A possible exception would be in the case of ‘Outsider Art’, which covers works such as folk or fairground art, or work done by people in jail or psychiatric hospitals. It could be argued that work done as an enrichment activity in a zoo constitutes Outsider Art in a similar way to work made as art therapy in a penal or medical institution.”

“A zookeeper once told me that they thought adult chimps had roughly the same intelligence levels as three-year-old human children. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it did strike me that a similar question could be asked of whether a three-year-old’s drawings were ‘art’ or not, and I suspect quite similar conclusions about intention and context would be drawn.”

“It makes a toddler’s drawing no less interesting or endearing that it may not be considered ‘art’, and I feel broadly the same is true of the higher primate’s output.”

The team running the show observed that the most human-like art was, perhaps unsurprisingly, coming from the animals most closely related to us. There was, however, an impressive depiction of a flower painted by an elephant. The piece was hung to demonstrate the remarkable dexterity of these animals when painting with the help of a human trainer, a testament to the connection between the elephants and their handlers. The higher primates still won out when it came to Tuck’s favorite, but it wasn’t a piece of Congo’s.

“My favourite piece is by a chimpanzee named Betty, who we worked with at the Tallinn Zoo in Estonia,” said Tuck. “The chimpanzees there were interesting for us as they were all wild animals that had been rescued from smugglers. This meant they hadn’t ‘learnt’ zoo enrichment behaviour from their group.” 

“Indeed, of the three only two engaged in mark-making. When we first met her, Betty had grown bored of painting, but we gave her some charcoal (obviously the media has to be non-toxic, which rather narrows down the options!) and rather gratifyingly she immediately started drawing again, using much the same combination of line drawing and smudging with her fingers that a human would do in the medium.” 

Humans have a great desire to find other organisms that experience life as we do, from the relationships and projections a person has with a dog or cat, right up to the notion of civilisations who think like us in faraway galaxies.

Will Tuck

“In this particular piece, there is a print of her nail and the end of her finger in charcoal dust from doing just this. Something I found fascinating working with the Tallinn chimps was that with both animals there seemed to be an idea of the drawing being ‘finished’ – once it reached a certain level of working, they wouldn’t return to it, but would start a new piece if plain paper was offered to them.” 

“This last point seemed important as it implied to me that they were still inclined to draw but didn't want to further alter their previous work.”

Artists in the wild

Bowerbirds were also included in the exhibition, a species famous for the impressive effort they put into building thatched twig tunnels, decorating them with pebbles, shells, bones, and colorful bits of trash. 

The goal of the bower is to attract a female, but she’ll have many options to choose from. As such, the male needs to give it his all if he’s going to win her favor, inspiring some to question if they have aesthetic sense.

A 2012 paper argued that these decorated bowers do constitute art because the males have to use their aesthetic sense to create something that will change the behavior of a female. While the males are the makers, it may be the females that show stronger evidence for aesthetics as they judge the bowers and mate with the male responsible for the best art. 

However, it is also possible that the inclusion of lots of bright objects could simply be more attention-grabbing, like a flashing siren.

Another remarkable courtship display in the wild is seen among pufferfish, which create geometric circles that can be 16 times greater than their body size. 

The male will painstakingly carve into the sand with its body, decorating it with shells and creating channels that redirect water so that the sand at the center of the circle is constantly being mixed. This central sand is the key, as it’s here that a female will lay her eggs if the male is successful. 

While it undeniably looks like art from a human perspective, it can’t be ignored that the shape of the circle seems to serve a function in mixing the sand. Does that count as art for art’s sake?

Reflections on ape art

Artists like Morris and Tuck have long been fascinated by animal-made art. 

Expanding our focus beyond primates to other species broadens our understanding of creativity and its role, sometimes for pure expression, and other times as a functional advantage. We might tie ourselves in knots over semantics, but it’s clear that observing the creativity to be found among animals can, at the very least, spark our own artistic curiosity. 

“Humans have, I think, a great desire to find other organisms that experience life as we do, from the relationships and projections a person has with a dog or cat, right up to the notion of civilisations who think like us in faraway galaxies,” said Tuck. 

“We wanted to show these artefacts to the public and hopefully get them thinking about the ways in which they were similar to things humans would make.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to grab a paintbrush. 

This Deep Dive feature first appeared in Issue 33 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. To access exclusive CURIOUS content first, and receive the quarterly digital magazine, become an All Access Member.