He was surrealism`s great champion, a friend to Magritte and Dali but Edward Jame`s lasting
legacy was an extraordinary tropical idyll he built in Mexico.
It started with the snow.
Having fled England to forge a new life in the Mexican jungle, Edward James devoted
years to cultivating tens of thousnds of orchids there, only to return from a 1962 trip
to New York to discover that they had perished in a freak snowstorm, so rare was snow
in that part of Mexico that the local people did not know what it was and explained
the devastation thus; ``Oh, Don Eduardo, white ashes fell and burned everything!``
James who had inherited a fortune from his father, an Americn railroad and mining
magnaye, decided to replace the orchids with something the weather could not
destroy.
For 20 years he dedicated much of his time and wealth to the design and construction
of a spectacular series of concrete sculptures amid the luscious vegatation of Las
Pozas, (The Pools) his vast estate in a tropical rain forest high in the Sierra Madre
Oriental mountains near a tiny town of Xilitla, about an eight-hour drive north of
Mexico city.
Some of the sculptures were inspired by the shapes of exotic plants and trees in
the surrounding jungle, others,by the convoluted forms in the immense collection
of the works by the surrealist artists James had assembled back in England.
Among his fantastical structures were totem poles, hidden rooms, teetering towers
and staircases leading to nowhere.
James gave them baffling names like ``The House With Three Storeys That Could Be
Five`` and ``Temple Of The Ducks`` and instructed the hundreds of artisans who`d
worked for him over the years to leave many of them finished.
A 1978 British television documentary filmed him strolling beautifically around his
domain, he was big-bellied beneath a poncho, had an unkempt white beard and green
parrots were perched on his shoulders.
who had befriended him 40 years before when Gastelum was the handsome young
manager of a telgrapph office in Cuernavaca, having helped James find Las Pozas in
1947. Gastelum worked there as a foreman on the creation of both the orchid gardens
and the concrete folllies, he was married to a local woman and they had four children,
who called James Uncle Eduardo, James eventualy adopted the children but his will
did not provide for the estate's upkeep and the Gastelums could not afford to maintain it.
The carefully cultivated plants died, the animals in the menagerie had to be released
into the jungle and the sculptures were soon overgrown with foliage.
A few dedicated surrealist fans continued to make the tortuous journey through the
mountains to Las Pozas every year, but the stories of the follies built by an eccentric
multi-millionaire in so beautiful surroundings and far flung a place became increasingly
apocryphal.
In 2007 the estate was acquired by Fondo Xilitla, a charitable foundation formed
to run it and restore James`s sculptures, since then, what James called his
Surrealist Xanadu has become a little more accessible.
The photographer Tim Walker first heard of Las Pozas from a friend, and along with an art directer
Jerry Stafford who had long been fasinated by James collected references to James
earlier life in England, went on to do a film shoot.
Most extraordinary of all are glimpses of Jame`s concrete fantasies amid the opulent
greenery of Las Pozaz.
Walker says ``It's the power of the dreamer``
