Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
by Margaret Hooks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Margaret HooksEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-26
ISBN: 1568986122
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
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Book Reviews of Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
Book Review: 98 Million Dollars!
Summary: 5 Stars
Margaret Hooks has written a brief life of the British eccentric and artist who created a surrealistic pavilion in the middle of a Mexican jungle, and did it all with his own money, taking not a drop of public funds. The irony is that today, James dead and his money long ago piddled away, huge impersonal foundations are being asked to underwrite preservation of crumbling, delapidated Las Pozas. The next quarter of a century will tell the tale, as any recent visitor will inform you. Hooks has been there many times, and she stresses the luxury of a visit, but the ordinary backpack traveler can find his or her own way there too, for the area was paved in the 1960s and you don't need an SUV any more to chop your way through the underbrush.
When constructing the folly, Edward James asked the proud Indian workers to strip off their clothes and work naked for him. His Caucasian secretaries were sometimes also asked to type in the nude. Joe LeSueur, once the boyfriend of the US poet Frank O'Hara, remembered the intimate side of Edward James, who took his sensible reluctance to "drink the water" to bizarre Howard Hughes like extremes. Once he watched James wash his hands 38 times within an hour. He kept his pencils plunged into a bar of soft soap to keep them "clean" and had his paper clips parboiled before re-using them.
He had relationships with women, including a stormy marriage to the notorious Austrian dancer Tilly Losch (DUEL IN THE SUN), and spent millions of dollars expanding her career, even hiring George Balanchine to create dances for her. He also had something of a crush on the actress Ruth Ford, lavished money on her as well. Hooks seems ambivalent about James' putative homosexuality, which is the first thing people noticed about him (even Losch married him assuming it was to be a marriage of convenience, and was appalled when he tried having sex with her). Hooks' brief book, no longer than one of those old William Shawn-era New Yorker articles, is written in a peculiar style, almost as if for children, and you probably have not in a long time read a biography with so many exclamation points in it. These punctuation marks appear whenever somethins especially startling happens to Edward James, which believe me, is pretty often, for he is the one who thought of the famous Surrealist "lobster telephone," and he made his own bedsheets carved out of wood, so that when you laid down on them, they were hard and stiff.
He had Tilly Losch's bare feet immortalized in a carpet that climbed the stairs, and later, when their marriage was over, he did the same thing with an Irish wolfhound. He built portholes for windows and installed a fish tank behind them, so you would think you were in a sinking ship. In Las Pozas he built an eighteen-foot tall human hand which is still there, crumbling and needing government assistance. He wrote upwards of thirty books and published all but one of them on his own private press.
The book is grandly illustrated with plenty of color closeups of the different weird things James built in Mexico. Edward James was about as deep as a square of pink satin, but he did know how to spend money like ouzo and that's always fun to read about.
Summary of Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
Icons of surrealism such as the Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips sofa would not exist if it weren't for Edward James. Born into fabulous wealth?-his father was a scion of the Phelps-Dodge dynasty, his mother a beautiful socialite said to be the daughter of King Edward VII?-James amassed one of the finest collections of surrealist art and was the major benefactor of Salvador Dal??, Leonora Carrington, and Rene Magritte. He lavished his fortune on an ostentatious lifestyle and landmark artistic ventures such as Dal??'s Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair and a series of Balanchine ballets for his wife, the exotic Viennese dancer Tilly Losch. Turning his back on the strictures of England, a faltering career as a poet, and his failed marriage, James followed the movable feast around Europe and then headed for America and 1940s Los Angeles, where he was a member of the colony of artists and writers that included Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, and Christopher Isherwood. But it was ultimately in Mexico that he felt at home and became an artist in his own right, creating the remarkable Las Pozas, in the remote town of Xilitla, an area abounding in waterfalls and wild orchids. Working with local Otomi Indians, he sculpted the jungle, illuminated the forest, and built parapets in the sky. Award-winning biographer Margaret Hooks tells the bizarre, often tragic tale of his life and the creation of his surreal masterpiece, illustrated with stunning photographs by Sally Mann, Michael Schuyt, Graciela Iturbide and others.Surrealism Books
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