A Brief History of Animal Art By Komar & Melamid and Mia Fineman

The history of twentieth-century art began with a violent surge of bestial energy. At the Paris Autumn Salon of 1905, a group of young painters headed by Henri Matisse exhibited a roomful of paintings that proclaimed the triumph of sensation and spontaneity over reason and decorum. To the viewing public of their time, these painters seemed possessed by a feral energy that threatened come crashing through floodgates of human civility. Struck by the strident colours and brash handling of their paintings, a hostile critic famously dubbed them 'Les Fauves'(Wild Beasts), and the name stuck.

This first bestial revolution in twentieth-century painting soon paved the way for the emotional atavism of the German Expressionists, which paved the way for Jackson Pollock gyrating and flinging paint like a wild man on a canvas laid out on the floor. The urge to move beyond the human, to harness the beast within and channel it onto the canvas, has long served as the secret animus of modern painting. And now, with the end of the century clealy in sight, it is high time that we let the beast out into the open.