Edward James

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The surrealistic garden of Las Pozas

Edward William Frank James (born August 16, 1907 in Greywalls , Scotland , † December 2, 1984 in Sanremo ) was a British multimillionaire, art collector, poet , patron and landscape artist . He was a supporter and early promoter of the surrealist movement. James was considered an eccentric . His life's work is the surrealistic sculpture garden Las Pozas in the Mexican rainforest, which he had built from 1964 to 1984.

Live and act

Edward James was the only son of Evelyn Forbes, a prominent Scottish lady of higher society, his father was allegedly the then Prince of Wales, his godfather, who later became King Edward VII. Edward James' mother had the American copper mine and railroad owner William in 1889 James married. His older sisters were named Audrey, Millicent, Xandra and Silvia.

West Dean House in Sussex

As a child of the English upper class, Edward received an education at the traditional Eton College and at the renowned Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland . He was later a fellow student of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton at Christ Church College , Oxford . His father died in 1912 and left the five-year-old the 6,000-acre estate of West Dean House in West Dean , Sussex , which he was later to expand into the West Dean Foundation (now the Edward James Foundation ), a cultural center for restoration and restoration Preserving artistic artifacts and preserving traditional handicrafts. In 1964, Edward James transformed the Foundation into a charitable trust .

Edward James' patronage began with the self-financed publication of the first book by the poet John Betjeman . At the University of Oxford he worked with the author Brian Howard on the work Glass Omnibus , which he was also to publish privately in 1934. After his time in Oxford, James briefly made a career as a diplomatic trainee at the British Embassy in Rome : After he was given the task of sending an encrypted message to London saying "the Italians had laid the keel for 3 destroyers", James did misunderstood the code and transmitted the keel laying of 300 destroyers, he was "on leave of absence".

From 1931 to 1934 Edward James was married to the Austrian dancer and actress Tilly Losch , later Countess of Carnarvon . However, the marriage was short-lived: Tilly accused him of homosexuality and filed for divorce.

The surrealism

Salvador Dalí was a friend and protégé of Edward James

In the Anglo-American art world, Edward James appeared primarily as an early promoter and advocate of surrealism. In the mid-1930s he became friends with Salvador Dalí . He toured Italy with the Spaniard. During the “International Surrealist Exhibition” in June 1936, Dalí and his wife were guests at James' Gala in London. Although Dalí was already an established artist at that time who could do without any donations, the eccentric Briton supported the equally exalted Catalan universal genius financially and increasingly began to collect Dalí's paintings and art objects. At the same time, James secured all rights to Dalí's works for four years. As a cosmopolitan James was acquainted with many well-known people in the company: In 1938, he made Dalí on his special request about Stefan Zweig with Sigmund Freud known. The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was also a guest in James' London house during the Second World War .

Edward James' fascination for surrealism is reflected in many areas: for example, in the promotion of the stimulating surrealist magazine Minotaure , which was published by Albert Skira and Tériade in Paris from 1933 to 1939 and in which James sporadically published his own articles, or in the redevelopment of Monkton House , part of the West Dean estate that he lived in himself and that he transformed into an idiosyncratic, surrealistic scenario. In Monkton House there were, among other things, Dalí's famous “ Mae West Lippe Sofa” (1936/37), the lobster or aphrodisiac telephone (1936) and a boa constrictor lamp, a coffin-shaped bed that resembled Napoleon's cot , a bathroom with transparent walls, and a carpet in the stairwell with the footprints of his wife Tilly Losch. He later had the latter replaced by the paw prints of his Irish Wolfhound. However, the multimillionaire fulfilled his greatest surrealistic dream in the middle of the rainforest of Mexico, where he had an enchanted jungle city built as a private park from 1947.

The Las Pozas Sculpture Park in Mexico

Edward James' surrealistic sculpture park Las Pozas near Xilitla, San Luis Potosí , Mexico
The main building with the Staircase to Heaven platform at the top on the 4th floor

While fleeing the war, Edward James left Great Britain in 1940 and first went to Los Angeles , where he was briefly inspired by the film metropolis and with other war-related emigrants such as Dalí, Man Ray , Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc as well as the Land Art artist Isamu Noguchi met. At this point James is said to have voiced his dream for the first time "... to create a garden of Eden " for which, as he said, "Mexico seems more romantic than the overpopulated Southern California."

He then went to Taos in New Mexico , where he lived for a while in the artists' colony around Mabel Dodge Luhan . Here he met Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas . A little later he accepted an invitation from the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm to Cuernavaca in Mexico, where he made friends with the Mexican aristocrat and hobby architect Plutarco Gastélum. Gastélum, half of Spanish descent and half of Yaqui , recommended James the place Xilitla, on the Sierra Madre, for its orchids . In 1947, on James' order, Gastélum acquired a plot of land at the Las Pozas  ⊙ small waterfalls in the Mexican rainforest, 5 km east of Xilitla. James soon began to build up his orchid cultivation, and he also laid out a butterfly garden . In 1962 a severe frost period destroyed the complex, and so James decided to immortalize his orchids as concrete sculptures in a sculpture garden. The project has developed over 20 years into an enchanted jungle city of unfinished palaces, temples and pagodas with stairs that lead to nowhere, winding paths, which, lined with columns with colorful capitals, lead to houses without ceilings and which are surrounded by exotic fauna such as flamingos, Parrots or strangler snakes are populated and overgrown by plants. The waterfalls and streams of the valley were meandered around the park and irrigate numerous fountains. Only one building of the total of 36 architectural curiosities is habitable: the eccentric builder, who the Mexicans soon called “The crazy Englishman” or “Don Eduardo” , lived in this jungle palace himself, when he was not in a similar house designed by Gastélum Xilitla lived.

Edward James burial place

The surrealistic park is partly inspired by the pictures of Max Ernst , to whom a building is dedicated, as well as by the monumental Modernisme Català by Antoni Gaudí . James drew the architectural sketches himself with the help of Plutarco Gastélum. Similar to a theme park , the individual “building objects” were given idiosyncratic and playful names such as The House with Three Storeys that Might be Five ( The house with three floors that could actually be five ), the temple of the ducks ( the temple of ducks ) or the house Destined to be a Cinema ( the house, which is intended to be a cinema ) where Edward James his imagination run wild left. Sometimes he recorded the feelings about his houses in short lines of poetry:

My House has wings and sometimes in the dead of the night, she sings.

- Edward James

Until Edward James' death in 1984, countless construction workers, mostly local Otomí Indians, built a fantasy city that stretches arbitrarily into the jungle without any recognizable system. The paintings of the sculptures and buildings, often kept in rainbow colors, were initially done by James himself, but with increasing age the paintings were made according to his instructions. Edward James invested all of his fortune in his life's work. With James' death, however, the construction of the park was stopped, which is why the facility gradually fell into disrepair. The Fondo Xilitla Foundation acquired the park in 2008 and has been maintaining and accessing the park since then.

Edward James died of a stroke on his way back from a visit to Europe. He was buried in the West Dean arboretum .

collection

Edward James owned one of the most extensive private collections of modern art, with an emphasis on surrealism and pittura metafisica . In addition to works by Dalí and Magritte, the brilliant collection also contained works by Giorgio de Chirico , Leonora Carrington , Paul Delvaux , Max Ernst , Alberto Giacometti , Paul Klee , Pablo Picasso , Pavel Tchelitchew and some paintings by Hieronymus Bosch . Two years after James' death, in June 1986, most of the items in his collection and Monkton House were auctioned off at Christie's .

Edward James himself appears in three famous surrealist paintings: on the left in Dalís Swan's Reflecting Elephants and in two pictures by René Magritte: as a burning head in The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) and as a back view in the mirror in Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite) (all 1937).

Movie

In the 1970s, Edward James was accompanied by documentary filmmakers Avery and Lenore Danziger on a walk through Las Pozas . The film shows the white-bearded James, dressed in a white robe, philosophizing about his jungle paradise and enthusiastically forging new plans. In one scene he pauses while parrots climb around on him, then he gives the “biblical” impression lasting effect and says in one scene: “I'd be like Noah with the Ark, if I could. - I would like to be like Noah with the ark if I could. "

The award-winning one-hour documentary Edward James: Builder of Dreams was released in 1996.

literature

Writings of Edward James

  • The bones of my hand. London 1930, published by Oxford University Press 1938
  • The Glass Omnibus. London 1934
  • Swans Reflecting Elephants, My Early Years. Autobiography edited by George Melly . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1982, ISBN 0-297-77988-5
    • Swans mirror elephants - My early years. From the English by Ursula Wulfekamp with an afterword by Hubertus Gaßner. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-8296-0597-7

Monographs

  • Margaret Hooks: Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas. Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2006, ISBN 1-56898-612-2 (English)
  • Nocola Coleby (Ed.): A Surreal Life: Edward James, Exhibition Catalog, Royal Pavilion. Brighton 1998, ISBN 0-85667-493-1 (English)

Illustrations

  1. ↑ Swans Reflecting Elephants in the English language Wikipedia
  2. ↑ The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James)
  3. ↑ Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite) in the English language Wikipedia

Web links

Commons : Las Pozas de Xilitla  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source: Arbeiter-Zeitung June 5, 1986
  2. ↑ See web link The Edward James Foundation
  3. ^ Linde Salber: Salvador Dalí . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2004, ISBN 3-499-50579-7 , pp. 72 f .
  4. ↑ Michael Kernan: Las Pozas: Edward James' fantasy stands tall in a jungle in Mexico. Retrieved January 8, 2013 .
  5. ^ William Middleton: Dream Works Las Pozas , The New York Times, March 29, 2008
  6. ↑ a b c Cate Kennedy: Concrete jungle. The Sidney Morning Herald, December 2, 2006, accessed March 29, 2008 .
  7. ↑ Margaret Hooks: Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas. (E-book) Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, accessed March 29, 2008 .
  8. ^ Las Pozas in Xilitla. travelbook.de, accessed on January 10, 2016 .
  9. ^ Eccentric founder of West Dean College. Argus, May 3, 2007, accessed January 10, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME James, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES James, Edward William Frank (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British multimillionaire, art collector, poet, patron and landscape artist
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Greywalls , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH 2nd December 1984
Place of death Sanremo