In 1935, the zoologist Julian Huxley took up his post as Secretary of the Zoological Society of London and Director of London Zoo, a post he held until 1942. Until now, little attention has been paid to the role Julian Huxley played within the artistic and intellectual emigration of the 1930s. He became a commissioner and mentor, and thus also a driving force for artistic careers.

Julian Huxley was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who was a leading supporter of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Julian Huxley was himself a convinced Darwinist, and an advocate of eugenics. From 1946 he played a leading role in the founding of UNESCO and was its first Director-General and, influenced by the effects of two world wars, promoted the idea of “evolutionary humanism” (Huxley 1964; Baker 1978, 38f.). He supported sexual equality between men and women, advocated birth control and the right to divorce – in his time, Huxley was, as Daniel J. Kevles writes, a “feminist of sorts” (Kevles 1992, 244). Marianne Sommer points to the relevance and convergence of the various activities of Huxley, who was active in a wide range of fields with a holistic understanding of his profession – with the aim of education, enlightenment, mediation and propagation (Sommer 2017). In 1948, Julian Huxley was involved in the founding of the first global conservation organisation, the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN), and a series of articles by Huxley for The Observer newspaper and his interest in African fauna in particular were not insignificant in the founding of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 (Sommer 2018, 140f.; Kellaway 2010).

Particularly characteristic of Huxley’s self-understanding as a zoologist was his approach of conveying complex knowledge about animal development and animal life to as broad an audience as possible. He used various channels (including the media): from the early 1940s, Huxley took part in the BBC radio programme “The Brains Trust”, in which a panel of experts answered questions from the audience. At its most successful, the programme had a market share of 29% of all adult radio listeners and received over 4,000 letters a week (Waters 1992, 10). Huxley was also active in the film business: as director of The Private Life of the Gannets (1934), a short film about gannets on a rocky island off the coast of Wales, produced by Alexander Korda, Huxley won an Academy Award in 1937. In the same year, Huxley was involved in the founding of Zoological Film Productions, a subsidiary of Strand Films (Summer 2018, 136). After the end of the war, he developed a three-part television programme with BBC Television and animal filmmaker and producer David Attenborough (Barrington-Johnson 2005, 133).

In addition, Huxley co-authored books with writers and photographers that were often aimed at a wide audience, including, for example, the illustrated publication The Science of Life, which he published together with the literary figure H.G. Wells and his son, the biologist G. P. Wells (Barrington-Johnson 2005, 114). In 1938, Julian Huxley, together with the emigrated bio-acoustician Ludwig Koch and the animal photographer Ylla, who lived in Paris and came from Vienna, published the sound book Animal Language, which was devoted to the communication and auditory forms of expression of zoo animals in pictures, text and sound (Huxley/Koch 1938).
Some years before Huxley worked with Ludwig Koch on Animal Language, he gave commissions to Hans Honigmann, physician, zoologist and director of the Breslau Zoo, who lost his post for “racial” reasons after the National Socialists came to power and was able to emigrate to England in 1935. Honigmann's first job was provided by Julian Huxley at the London Zoo, where he spent 18 months doing research in the zoo laboratory, including on the digestive system of sloths (Huxley 1974, 206).

Huxley initiated the construction of an Animal Art Studio in the zoo, where art students and freelance artists were given the opportunity to work with live zoo animals. The studio was designed by the emigrant architect Berthold Lubetkin and his group Tecton. Lubetkin had also been responsible, in 1935 – before Huxley's tenure – for designing the zoo’s gorilla house and Penguin Pool (on Lubetkin’s zoo buildings see Allan 2012, 199–251).
The artist and animal illustrator Erna Pinner also worked with Huxley and contributed a world map of animal species to the 1937 Zoo Guide. The results of her observations of animals in the wild as well as in the zoo are to be found in such books as Wonders of Animal Life (1945) and Curious Creatures (1951). Huxley had a long-standing collaboration with the photographer Wolf Suschitzky, whom he met while filming in the zoo grounds in the 1930s. Suschitzky contributed photographs for Lorna Lewis’s book The Children’s Zoo (1939), which was dedicated to the zoo for children set up by Huxley. He also contributed to the Animal and Zoo Magazine, founded by Julian Huxley in 1936, which was published until 1941 and for which Suschitzky provided cover photos and photographs for the inside section. Wolf Suschitzky and Julian Huxley also kept in touch in later years. In 1956, their joint book Kingdom of the Beasts was published by Thames & Hudson, which brings together Wolf Suschitzky's animal and zoo photographs from previous decades.
Huxley’s interest above all in the common origin of apes and humans led to a collaboration with the Berlin doctor and palm reader Charlotte Wolff, who emigrated to London via Paris. For her book Studies in Hand Reading (Chatto & Windus, 1936), Wolff read the hand of Julian Huxley and his brother, the writer Aldous Huxley, among others. On behalf of the zoo, she applied chirology to the primates at London Zoo. Elaborate imprinting techniques were used for Wolff's project. Charlotte Wolff published her results in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (Wolff 1937; Wolff 1938).

Precisely because of his various public activities and his various efforts to communicate knowledge either to specialists or to the public, Huxley was long perceived in research as a “public scientist” rather than a “research scientist” (Waters 1992, 22). But it was Julian Huxley's appearance as a public intellectual that made him an important, popular supporter of the émigré community. In 1937, he chaired the Farewell Dinner for Walter Gropius, with émigré guests such as Ernst L. Freud, László Moholy-Nagy and Nikolaus Pevsner. In the newsletter Freie Deutsche Kultur of the Free German League of Culture, Julian Huxley published an encouraging greeting to the members in October 1941: “The Free German League of Culture has accomplished a considerable amount of valuable work in stimulating cultural activities among Germans in Great Britain and in linking these up with British activities. I hope that it will continue to flourish and carry on with its useful work.” (Freie Deutsche Kultur, October 1941, 1).