This month in 1964, the talk of the art world was an exciting avant garde painter named Pierre Brassau.
Except that this painter was actually a chimpanzee, and Pierre Brassau was a big old hoax.
The human behind the hoax was Åke “Dacke” Axelsson, who worked for a tabloid newspaper in Sweden.
He thought that it was time to put art critics to the test: could they tell the difference between actual modern art and works that someone presented as modern art but was actually just painted by a chimp?
Axelsson went to a Swedish zoo and got permission to give a West African chimp named Peter some oil paints, brushes and canvases.
Having had no formal art training, Peter first tried eating the paint (his favorite was cobalt blue).
Eventually he took a new approach: he ate bananas while putting the paint on surfaces, mostly the walls of his habitat and his handlers at the zoo, but also a few canvases as well.
Axelsson took some of these canvases to a gallery exhibition, where he claimed they’d been painted by a mysterious newcomer called Pierre Brassau.
And the art critics were pretty enthusiastic about the works.
One wrote that Bressau’s “brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”
One of the paintings sold for what would be worth like $900 in today’s money.
But another critic seemed to catch that there was something different about these paintings.
He wrote, “only an ape could have done this.”
And, of course, he wasn’t far off.
Though, interestingly, after Axelsson revealed that there was no Pierre Brassau and that the artworks exhibited under his name were actually done by a paint-eating chimpanzee, one of the critics insisted that they were still the best work in the show.
Today in 1917, the California Associated Raisin Company received a trademark for the name Sun-Maid.
The young lady in the famous raisin logo was inspired by an actual person: Lorraine Collett was out wearing a red bonnet one day when she was spotted by a company executive.
He asked her to pose for a painting, and together they made raisin history.
Why didn’t they have Pierre Brassau do a logo for them in the 60s?
The Monkey Artist Hoax (Today I Found Out)
Our history (Sun Maid)
