The Secret Life of Edward James, George Melly's documentary film from 1975. The film is a biography of surrealist art collector Edward James. James was patron of René Magritte, Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí (the Mae West Lips sofa was originally designed for his house Monkton), and lived the only life a responsible aristocrat can lead: inventing impossibilities and flouting convention.
James' life is a catalogue of incredible moments: the argument of his royal paternity, defacing his Lutyens-designed home with surrealist flair, his scandalous divorce and bisexual forays. All of this was a prelude to his final monument: Las Pozas. A surrealist sculpture garden filled with gigantic concrete structures that burst out of the Mexican jungle, it is full of needless and wonderful invention.
Not screened since its first appearance over 35 years, this film is a serious addition to the canon of British eccentricity. Jazz musician and art historian George Melly teases out James' unique character as only a fellow member of the rarefied clan could. The film includes footage of Leonora Carrington, the great surrealist artist, as she smokes, drinks and laughs at a gathering and working in her studio on a drawing.
Edward James was charming, eccentric, generous and immensely wealthy. For most of his life, his greatest talent was placing himself in interesting situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, it was James who prised it off with a billiard cue. The back of his head features twice – once in the mirror – in René Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced (one of Magritte’s most reproduced works). In 1937 he bought in advance everything Dalí painted that year, a gesture that, unlike most of his patronage, increased his net worth considerably.
James wrote poetry, some of which he had privately printed, but for the first half of his life he mostly produced, published and facilitated the work of others. It was not until the 1960s, in Mexico, that he began work on his enduring creation: a surrealist sculpture park in the jungle-covered hills of Xilitla above the Gulf coast. Over the next two decades, he expanded it to fill a twenty-acre valley around a cascade of waterfalls and pools. Las Pozas (‘the pools’) turned out to be the perfect project for someone with a fertile imagination and almost unlimited resources who was far more interested in starting things than finishing them. One structure after another rose among the ferns, magnolias, bromeliads and mango and banana trees: tier on tier of platforms from which sprouted nonsensical concrete shapes and flourishes, wrought-iron gates leading to secret gardens, staircases and bridges leading nowhere. When the limits of gravity were reached, a structure would be abandoned and another begun.
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