If
you wander away from the town of Xilitla in Mexico and enter the
tropical rain rainforest then you are likely to come across something
unexpected but extraordinary. The jungle, at over 2000 feet above sea
level, retreats to uncover 80 astonishing acres of pools, buildings,
statues and walkways. You have just discovered Las Pozas (
The Pools in English).
You
could perhaps be forgiven that you have stumbled upon the remains of a
city which had been inhabited by some offshoot of Aztec culture: before
they abandoned it they created surrealist art hundreds of years before
its time.
Yet the garden, a ten hour drive north east of Mexico City, was dreamed
up by someone born on a different continent, the eccentric and
flamboyant British poet Edward James (pictured left).
James
was from a singularly privileged background. Born in 1907 he was the
sole male heir to the fortune of the American railroad magnate William
James. James senior was a britophile who had married a Scottish
socialite and settled in the UK. His father died when he was five years
old, leaving him very, very wealthy. When his mother died he inherited a
second fortune.
Money
can’t buy you one thing and certainly James’ social connections and
Midas like wealth were not to bring him great happiness. Uncertain of
both himself and those around him by sheer dint of his enormous
prosperity, James entered a disastrous marriage complicated by his
latent homosexuality and led a tortured and restless existence. In
search of somewhere and something he would eventually come across a
magical glade of pools and waterfalls in Mexico and make it his home and
his life project – and find his own kind of peace.
However,
that would not be until his forties. James’ attempts to get a ‘proper’
job in his younger years were always sincere but never successful and
Edward James became a noted and generous benefactor to the arts. He
sponsored the publication of John Betjeman’s first volume of poems. He
commissioned Brecht and Weill’s last work together, The Seven Deadly
Sins. He supported Salvador Dali for a whole year (1938) and allowed
René Magritte to live in one of his London houses for two years. He was
one of the movers and shakers of the world art community in the 1930s,
surrealism’s early and great champion.
James
tired of Europe and particularly England in the late 1930s. He went
first to New York and then to Taos in New Mexico where he lived in an
artist’s colony for some time. Time in Hollywood saw the
multi-millionaire meet and befriend some of the more notable names of
the day, including Man Ray, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and
Igor Stravinsky.
His
background of wealth may have contributed to James’ inability to root
himself anywhere for a long period. However, when he washed up in the
Americas in the early 1940s all that was about to change. He had
arrived on the continent with a surrealist vision – albeit a
fantastically expensive one. Las Pozas was about to be born.
The
search for the ideal location would take five years. James had planned
for the garden to be in Los Angeles but had decided that Mexico was
more romantic than overcrowded California.
He befriended a dazzlingly handsome young telegraph office manager,
Plutarco Gastelum - left in a painting by Carlyle Brown. This was while
he was visiting Cuernavaca, the capital and principal city of the state
of Morelos in Mexico.
Together they headed off in to the jungle and found Xilitla (which you pronounce
Hill-eet-la) towards the end of 1945.
James
never lived there permanently as his art and business interests took
him all over the world but his long visits would at Xilitla would be
happy ones up to his death in 1984. Plutarco built James a house (which
is now a hotel). Uncle Edward as he became known was soon surrounded
by children as Plutarco married a local woman, Marina, had four children
with her and moved in with his employer. No one can say for sure
whether Plutarco and Edward had had a sexual relationship but one thing
is known: at the wedding Edward James got himself monumentally drunk.
Yet
instead of running back to England in a sulk, James continued to visit
for long periods and became godfather to the offspring of Marina and
Plutarco.
The children were not short of pets – as Las Pozas grew so did James’
menagerie – he owned 200 birds and 40 dogs. He also had a number of boa
constrictors which he once took on a trip to Mexico City.
As
you might imagine, Las Pozas took a considerable amount of time and
money to create and James did not consider it complete even when he died
in 1984. There are thirty six concrete follies in the garden, a
combination of pagodas, temples and palaces – all of which are not quite
what they seem on first inspection. Unfortunately, too, James failed to
provide enough money for it to be properly looked after when he was
dead. It took some looking after, too.
It
has to be said that James was, quite probably, irretrievably bonkers,
in that very English way; perhaps something like a character from a
Waugh or a Christie novel. As he became elderly he would be carted
around his property, with parrots in tow.
He would request that workers in the garden conduct their duties in the
nude (they happily obliged) and he fired one worker for interrupting him
while he was having a conversation with an orchid (though he was later
reinstated).
But
what a legacy! Some of the sculptures at the site, like the Staircase
to Heaven and House on Three Floors Which Will in Fact Have Five or Four
or Six are simply enormous. Bridges, ramps, steps and walkways abound
in intricate patterns throughout the site. Altogether the garden cost
over $5 million – a large enough sum now let alone then. In order to
create his own surrealist heaven, however, James had to auction off his
own collection of art which at the time was looked upon as the finest
collection of surrealist art in private hands.
This
amazing sculpture garden is, however, showing signs of age. The
ravages of time and the jungle have not been kind to it and four years
ago a foundation was created by concerned parties, including the local
state government, to pay for, sustain, preserve and restore Las Pozas.
The only son of Plutarco and Marina, Kako, is one of the management
team. We will, perhaps, be hearing more about this marvelous and
labyrinthine garden in the future as it is hoped that it will take its
rightful place on the global art map sooner rather than later.
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