Las Pozas Unlike the other artists mentioned here, who built paradisal worlds with their own two hands and materials that other people threw away, Edward James spent millions of dollars, and enlisted 40 full-time laborers, to create his world. James was the only son of an American railroad baron and a Scottish socialite, and thus, he was born very, very rich. When Edward James was only four, his father died, and James therefore inherited the family’s 8,000-acre estate, West Dean House. James attended the best schools England had to offer, and as an adult, became an author, poet and ardent supporter of the arts who hobnobbed with the likes of the Mitford sisters, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley. James published books of poetry (including some of his own), commissioned Balanchine productions when he fell in love with a dancer, and became a friend and patron of surrealist artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Noguchi. West Dean House, which James decorated in a Surrealist manner, was the first home of Dali’s Mae West Lips Sofa and Lobster Telephone, and Dali liked to proclaim that Edward James was crazier than all the other surrealists combined. In the 1940s, after his messy divorce rankled English society, James made his way to Mexico, specifically in the jungle in Xilitla. He settled on a particular spot there one day when, while sunbathing after a swim, a swarm of blue butterflies descended and covered his naked body. James took this as a sign that he was in the right place to freely nurture his passion for orchids and exotic animals—of which he had everything from parrots and flamingos to monkeys and ocelets. He traveled with his pet boa constrictors, only staying in the nicest hotels where they were permitted, and according to legend, once hired a composer to write a requiem for his dying crocodile. In the 1960s, after a frost had killed his orchids, James traveled to Los Angeles, where he visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. He returned to Mexico with a new idea—he would rebuild his garden, this time out of cement. Over the next 25 years, in a 50-acre jungle landscape 2,000 feet up in the mountains, James would create more than 200 concrete sculptures, each of which he would carefully design on his sketch-pad before hiring workers to build them. He gave many of his sculptures surrealist names, such as The House With Three Stories That Might Be Five, The Stegosaurus Colt, The Temple of the Ducks, and The House Destined to be a Cinema. He dubbed the garden Las Pozas, after its centerpiece of nineconcrete pools fed by a natural waterfall, and the garden is filled with walk-ways, animal shapes, towering columns, flying buttresses, and a stairway that ascends straight to heaven. This was a signature of James’: doors, gates, and stairways that lead to nothing. Many people seem to interpret many of James’ acts and behaviors as motivated by his desire to be not just a patron of the arts, but as an artist himself, and with Las Pozas, he finally achieved this. Though James he had devoted his wealth to Las Pozas in life, even selling his collection of Surrealist works to pay for its construction, when he died in 1984, he failed to leave behind proper funding to pay for its upkeep. What a typical artist.
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“I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies.” —Edward James