Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas [Hardcover]

Margaret Hooks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2006

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 leading socialite, —James amassed one of the finest collections of surrealist art and was the major benefactor of Salvador Dali, Leonora Carrington, and Rene Magritte. He lavished his fortune on an ostentatious lifestyle and landmark artistic ventures such as Dali's 'Dream of Venus' pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair and a series of ballets known as Les Ballets Russes to woo his wife, the Viennese dancer Tilly Losch. Turning his back on the strictures of England society and his failed marriage, James followed the movable feast around Europe before leaving 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, Lourdes Almeida and others.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A visually luscious book, the art writer ... Margaret Hooks provides a monument to James's fantastical life and works and a blueprint for his subconscious. --Vogue Living

Surreal Eden does what many good art biographies and histories do: remind us of what gets forgotten and left out of 'official' canons. --Rain Taxi

James's architectural art had no use beyond its own fantastic forms. It was both process and spectacle, and inspiration for inspiration. --The New York Times

About the Author

Margaret Hooks has written extensively on art for publications that include ARTnews, VOGUE, Afterimage, Grand Street, The Photograph Collector and The Observer Magazine. Her other books include 'Edward James & Las Pozas' (2008), 'Tina Modotti Photographs' (2006), 'Frida Kahlo: Portrait of an Icon' (2003) and the award-winning biography 'Tina Modotti: Radical Photographer' (2000).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (October 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568986122
• ISBN-13: 978-1568986128
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,060,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Surrealism

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 98 Million Dollars!, February 2, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas (Hardcover)

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.