Desmond Morris s’est éteint  à 98 ans le 19 avril 2026 à Naas (Irlande)

Une vie en surréalisme

En souvenir de sa poésie traduite en français et publiée aux éditions du Grand Tamanoir en 2020, À tue-tête / Headworks

Des hommages à Desmond Morris sont publiés sur cette page et sur une autre page

Desmond Morris dans Infosurr : n° 28, 60, 65, 79, 111, 114, 135, 137, 141, 150, 151, 153, 170

Hommages

Neil Coombs

Desmond, may 2026

Figures formed from the alchemists’ still
The guts of mammals
and hollow hill
The grinding of life in the pestle brain
Forming a landscape
Again and again
To people the land with biomorph creatures
To snake through the study of earthlings’ features
To trace trajectories down to extinction
To watch man and beast
Is our fate and our fiction

Silvano Levy

The Night the Animals Left

It was in the early hours of Sunday 19th April 2026 that Desmond Morris drew his last breath. The ‘night’, he had always said, was his ‘special time’. That was when, in nocturnal silence and solitude, he would hunker down in his studio. For it was there that the spectacle of the biomorphs, those globular, amoeba-like quasi-creatures, would spring into life. Desmond would not have countenanced something as dramatic as leaving life other than during his beloved night.

To the end, his heart was in the surrealist world he had created. A couple of days before his demise he wrote, ‘Feeling a bit terminal, but there is a painting that needs finishing. Must fight this.’ These were the thoughts onto which he clung in his hospital bed despite the adversity that he was enduring; never losing his markedly English wry humour, he remarked, ‘My nerve pain is as bad as Joan of Arc when the flames reached her legs.’

But perhaps the reveries into which the morphine finally took him were those that had overwhelmed him decades earlier, when he entered the world of the biomorphs. During an episode of unusually high temperature in 1949 he had fallen into a deep sleep that turned into a delirious nightmare. He dreamt that he was in his studio and that, as he happened to look through the glazed roof, he saw a horrific creature in the tree above:

There’s one enormous creature I can just see out of the corner of my eye perched on one of the highest branches of the tree that hangs close over this glass roof … It has a single claw and a red head with big teeth fixed all around it which strangely enough seem quite sad … I was wrong; it is in fact a circle of very pointed breasts … They start circling, a swarm of little sexual buds, around the creature on the branch which sways precariously. (Desmond Morris, ‘The Day the Animals Came’, Mermaid, Vol. 17, No. 2 (spring 1951), pp. 31-2)

The nightmare did not stop there. The monstrosity suddenly toppled and fell on top of him, triggering a sinister transformation; Desmond bodily merged with the fallen ogre:

My legs are also tight together and I find on looking down that they are now a single hard claw and the grass is a long way below and I am eating leaves.

Transformed into a grotesque avian, Desmond then looked down to see his original human form still painting in the studio. The avian counter-being then resolved to swoop down to conjoin with its former self. It never did.

That was the only time that the biomorphs and Desmond had been parted – until now.

Michel Remy

Desmond, 20th April 2026

Because Millers Weir is weeping all the tears of bulrushes
to no avail
Because all the humpcocks and buglemouths have lost their way in the dark night of reason
to no avail
Because the grinning parade of aboriginal and Dogon masks has called him back desperately
to no avail
Because we all are mourning the crocodiles of love and apes of hope
humming away the morning melodies and serenades of humming birds
to no avail
Because our sadness has opened the veins and arteries of the brain to the wind of chance
to no avail

The gathered crowd of amoebae and protozoa the colour of infinite freedom
is screaming against all signposts and directions for use
is challenging the time counted for mortals
and summoning the time of the future of memory
to be OUR time
and flow with our blood
the shape of fire

It is now raining in all the gardens of Athgarvan

John Richardson

Homage to Desmond Morris, 2 May 2026

John Welson

The Visitor, 2007, « a drawing that I gave to Desmond Morris in 2007. Desmond often referred to it as it has an insect’s rear portion and this appealed to Desmond. »