"Edward James - Biography" a Xilitla Travel Page by alfredop

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Edward James

"Look, we move among a bunch of 'pseudo-realists',
who.... produce nothing but junk.
So, they try to act like madmen to justify themselves.
On the other hand, you who are real
labor to act sane....."
Salvador Dali to Edward James

Edward James was
Born in 1907 supposedly as an illegitimate child of Kind Edward VII. born and lived as a noble millionaire, Edward James was a man obsessed by the surreal world- keeping company and sponsoring such artists and luminaries as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Leonora Carrington, René Magritte and Aldous Huxley.

Leaving England in 1940 with the intention of making the United States his home, he found himself in 1944 moving instead to the city Cuernavaca, Mexico.

There he met Plutarco Gastélum, a yaqui photographer and telegraph operator with whom Edward began traveling the country, discovering during these travels the delights of the waterfalls and pools of the Arroyo de La Conchita near Xilitla of which he fell in love. Edward, being a visionary, visualized his future dream right in the heart of this place.

It is said that while bathing in the pools at Las Pozas, Edward saw a cloud of butterflies come down toward him through the canyon, their thickness momentarily cutting off the rays of the sun - Edward saw this incredible spectacle of fluttering wings as a sign that this was to be his home and thereafter set about to transform Las Pozas into his Enchanted Garden.

Gastélum was later to become Edward's construction foreman for his monumental, artistic structures as well as the builder of the house in Xilitla itself in which James lived, now converted into the El Castillo Guest House.

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Young Edward James

Biography

By Michael Kernan
http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/mkernan/onemansfantasy.html

Xilitla/Las Pozas is strange, but not half as strange as its creator. His American grandfather, already a millionaire with vast timber holdings, married into the mining wealth of the Phelps Dodge family before moving to England. . One of his three sons, who made his career as the master of West Dean Park and its 6,000 acres in Sussex, married an Englishwoman who was reputed to be an orphaned daughter of Edward Vll.

Despite being a rumor saying that Edward James was King Edward VII illegitimate son and given away to his aunt and his husband, the official version says that Edward James was born to them in 1907, into a world of nannies and shooting parties, shuttled seasonally between West Dean, his parents' London town house in Bryanston Square and a summer place in Scotland. He went to Eton, and hated it. At Oxford he had a Rolls-Royce and a silk-lined room worthy of a Sebastian Flyte, and he soon drifted into the gilded London society of Sitwells, Mitfords and Cunards, of Noel Coward and John Betjeman, of Agustus John and Randolph Churchill.

A charming person, Edward James, a wonderful raconteur and a lover of parties. His hermetic childhood left him curiously innocent about the world of work. And impulsively generous: once when a friend wanted to borrow his car, he gave it to him. But then a reaction - "They want my money, they want my blood"- and he would retreat into introversion.

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Tilly Losch

He was a packrat who never threw anything away, and so obsessively fastidious that he would boil up a saucepan full of old paperclips, drenched in cologne, for reuse. Named to a diplomatic post, he almost caused an incident through his insouciant mistranslations and was fired. He wrote poetry and printed it himself, wrote a novel or two, fell in with avant-garde artists and then, in 1928 met Tilly Losch.
She was dancing in a Noel Coward revue but was celebrated more for her sinuous, wanton beauty than for her dancing. She filmed a performance piece that featured her lovely hands sinuously interlacing to Bach's "Air on a G String". James married her. He was 24.
Soon it turned out that she had fancied a marriage in name only (it happened in those days). She involved herself in a series of increasingly visible affairs, including a primal scene on a sofa with Randolf Churchill witnessed by a maid, and finally left him. To get her back James financed George Balanchine's first company, Les Ballets 1933, paying for three ballets for her, including the landmark Brecht-Weill collaboration "The Seven Deadly Sins," performed by Tilly Losch and Lotte Lenya, and another ballet with music by Darius Milhaud and sets and costumes by Andre Derain.

It was no use. Tilly sued for separation, charging homosexuality among other things, whereupon James scandalized everyone by countersuing, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky. Astonished and wounded by the outcry, for this simply was not something a gentleman did, James moved to Europe for a while.

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Edward James' mask

While in Europe he met Salvador Dali and was so taken by him that he contracted to buy all his work for a year and to subsidize Dali's "Dream of Venus" exhibit for the 1933 New York World's Fair. He was already buying Picassos, and that same year, 1937-38, he patronized Rene Magritte and joined the Surrealist movement in earnest.
"La Reproduction Interdite", the famous Magritte painting of a man shown from behind as he looks into a mirror and sees the same back of head, is a portrait of the back of Edward James' head. He is also the model for the head-as-explosion-of-light portrait Pleasure Principle, though one can hardly tell.