Edward James

An heir at four, and a story about a king

Edward Frank Willis James was born on 16 August 1907, the only son and youngest child of William Dodge James, an American-born millionaire, and Evelyn Forbes. He had four older sisters. His father died in 1912 and the boy inherited West Dean, a large estate in West Sussex, together with the money, at the age of four. He went to Eton and then to Christ Church, Oxford, where his friends included the poet John Betjeman, whose first book, Mount Zion, James paid to publish in 1931.[1]

A story has attached itself to him that needs stating carefully, because it is repeated everywhere as fact. King Edward VII was Edward James's godfather and a regular visitor to West Dean. That much is documented. The rumour that went round society, and that a Hilaire Belloc ballad hinted at, was that the King was actually his father. No evidence for it has ever been produced. James himself preferred a different version, writing in his memoir that he was not the King's son but his grandson, on the theory that his own mother was the King's unacknowledged daughter. That claim is also unproven, and James plainly enjoyed telling it.

Tilly Losch and Les Ballets 1933

In 1931 James married the Austrian dancer and choreographer Tilly Losch. What followed is the first clear example of his lifelong method, which was to buy the thing he wanted to exist. To give his wife a company to dance in, he financed Les Ballets 1933, with George Balanchine as choreographer and Boris Kochno as artistic director.

He had met Kurt Weill in Paris in December 1932 and commissioned a new work from him. The result was The Seven Deadly Sins, with music by Kurt Weill and a text by Bertolt Brecht, the last thing the two of them made together. It had its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 7 June 1933, with Lotte Lenya singing Anna I and Tilly Losch dancing Anna II, a pairing James had written into the commission. Caspar Neher designed it. Paris was unimpressed, the company lasted under four weeks, and it made no money.[2]

The marriage collapsed the following year in a divorce case that the newspapers enjoyed and neither party came out of well. Losch's countersuit failed. James did not marry again.

The Dalí contract, 1936–1938

James met Salvador Dalí in 1935, and in 1936 the two signed a contract of a kind almost no other artist of the period had. In exchange for a regular allowance, James took effectively everything Dalí produced. Its formal term ran from June 1937 to June 1938, and it made James the owner of the best Dalís of the decade, among them The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants and Autumn Cannibalism.

Two objects made under that contract have outlived everything else. The Lobster Telephone was made in 1936, a plaster lobster laid over the handset of a working telephone. Eleven were built, seven with white lobsters and four with red, for James's own houses. Tate holds one of the red ones, and a white example sold at auction in 2018 for £853,047. The Mae West Lips Sofa, shaped as the actress's mouth, was produced in five examples by the London firm Green and Abbott in 1938, and one of those is at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[3]

On 19 July 1938 Dalí was taken to meet Sigmund Freud at his house in Hampstead, north London, where Freud had arrived as a refugee only weeks earlier. Accounts credit the introduction to the writer Stefan Zweig and to Edward James in varying proportions; what is not in doubt is that James went with them and was in the room. Dalí drew Freud while they talked. Freud, who had spent his career arguing that dreams conceal their meanings, wrote afterwards that in classic paintings he looked for the unconscious and in Surrealist ones for the conscious, and called Dalí a fanatic. Dalí took it as praise.[4]

Magritte at Wimpole Street, 1937

James brought René Magritte to London between 12 February and 19 March 1937 and put him up at 35 Wimpole Street, where the painter worked on large canvases for the ballroom. Two of the pictures Magritte made in that period are portraits of his host, and both are strange ways to paint a patron.

Not to Be Reproduced shows James from behind, facing a mirror that reflects the back of his head again instead of his face. The Pleasure Principle shows him seated with a burst of white light where his head should be. James also bought from Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Pavel Tchelitchew and Paul Delvaux, and backed the Paris Surrealist journal Minotaure before buying it outright, keeping its publisher Albert Skira on as editor.[5]

He went on writing poetry through all of it, and minded that nobody took the poems as seriously as they took his cheques. In 1937 he paid Francis Poulenc twenty thousand francs to set four of his French poems to music. The resulting cantata, Sécheresses, had its premiere at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 2 April 1938.

Monkton House

Monkton was a small Lutyens hunting lodge on the West Dean estate, and James had it remade from the late 1930s as a Surrealist interior, working with the architects Christopher Nicholson and Hugh Casson and with ideas from Dalí. The outside was painted purple. Drainpipes were cast in the shape of bamboo, palm-tree columns held up the porch, and sheets and towels were carved in concrete over the windows, as though laundry had been hung out and then petrified.[6]

The Lobster Telephone and the Mae West sofa lived here. The contents were dispersed in a sale in 1986, two years after his death, which is how so many of the objects reached museums.

Las Pozas, and the last thirty years

James went to Mexico in the 1940s and stayed. With his friend and manager Plutarco Gastélum he found a place in the rainforest near the village of Xilitla, in San Luis Potosí, with waterfalls and natural pools. He first filled it with orchids and animals. After a frost killed the orchids in 1962 he began building instead, and did not stop for the rest of his life.

Las Pozas is around thirty-six concrete structures spread across several dozen acres of jungle. There are staircases that end in the air, doorways opening onto nothing, columns shaped like flowers, and pavilions with names such as The House With a Roof Like a Whale. Almost nothing in it was meant to be lived in. He paid for the work partly by selling off the Surrealist paintings he had bought in the 1930s.

In 1964 he had given West Dean to a charitable foundation in his name, and the estate now houses West Dean College, which teaches art, craft and conservation. He died at San Remo in Italy on 2 December 1984, aged 77. Las Pozas passed in 2007 to a Mexican foundation that has been conserving it since, and the site is on Mexico's tentative list for World Heritage status.