Literature: - The Surrealist World of Desmond Morris, Michel Remy, page 103, 104 illustrated

‘The Naked Ape’ is the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear the name Desmond Morris, however this famous zoologist/author/presenter has always been equally as serious about his paintings. A good friend of Miro and in fact all the British Surrealist group, it is only been in the last few years has he released enough of his studio of a life-time’s work for people to realise not only how superb his strange breed of biomorphic surrealism is, but also his huge contribution and importance in the history of British painting. He is, in a proper sense of the word, the last living Surrealist and also perhaps their best kept secret.
Desmond shared his first London exhibition with Joan Miro in 1950 at the London Gallery, and at this time he was the youngest official member of the of the British Surrealist Group, painting and also writing and directing two Surrealist films, Time Flower and The Butterfly and the Pin. In trying to explain in words Desmond’s own unique surrealism, Philip Oakes writes in his introduction to The Secret Surrealist: His paintings are records of field trips, expeditions into the interior. What he finds in his imagination he brings back alive.
As with all Surrealist art, there is inevitably an undercurrent of autobiography and the world outside, no matter how hard an artist may try for it to be completely a journey of the deep unconscious. A Lapse of Heart is a particularly highly valued and sentimental painting to Desmond and until now he has kept it since he painted it in the 1960s when it adorned the walls of his house in Malta. He had become somewhat of an ‘overnight millionaire’ following the success of the Naked Ape (1967) and he and his wife moved to Malta where for the first time in his working life he was rid of the constraints of an office. He had a villa with a swimming pool, an orange grove and unlimited sunlight and A Lapse of Heart reflects his feelings about his new home. It is a huge joyful painting in which the cell-like, biological shapes and forms bask in luminous colours, full of warmth and happiness.

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