Edward James

The eccentric British poet and landscape gardener Edward James was one of the most important patrons of Surrealist art in the twentieth century. He provided financial support to artists such as Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, and René Magritte during the 1930s and 1940s and assembled one of the earliest and most significant collections of Surrealism outside of France. Though never formally a member of the Surrealist group, James helped to shape the international reception of Surrealism in England and throughout the United States and Mexico.

Born in 1907 to an aristocratic mother, James was also heir to his British American father’s vast fortune in metals. He spent his childhood at his family’s 6,000-acre country estate at West Dean in Sussex, England. After completing his education at Eton and Oxford, James pursued a career as a poet and established his own publishing house, James Press, in 1931. In the following years, as he wrote and traveled within elite circles throughout Europe, he provided financial support to his artist friends in many fields, from literature to the ballet and theater. During his brief marriage to Austrian dancer Tilly Losch from 1931 to 1934, which granted him access to the ballet community, James commissioned original works by composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Kurt Weill, and Bertholt Brecht while serving as the principal financial backer of choreographer Georges Balanchine’s ballet company, Les Ballets 1933. After his divorce, James hosted an international coterie of artists, writers, and wealthy collectors at the Villa Cimbrone, his rented summer home on the Amalfi coast in Italy. His visitors included the Vicomte Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, through whom he met the artist Salvador Dalí in 1934. He became the foremost collector of the Spanish artist’s work in the six years that followed.

James committed more of his time and financial resources to Surrealist art in 1936, a critical moment in which André Breton and his associates pursued the “internationalization” of Surrealism. In addition to financing and contributing articles to the Parisian Surrealist journal Minotaure,James became involved in Surrealist exhibitions and publications in Britain and the United States. In order to introduce Surrealist ideas to the British public, James provided funding and organized programming associated with the first International Surrealist Exhibition, held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in the summer of 1936. Two works from James’s collection—a pastel by Pablo Picasso and a painting by Salvador Dalí—were included in the show, and he acquired paintings by British Surrealists Paul Nash and Roland Penrose around the same time. Later in the year, he loaned three works by Dalí to Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,organized by Alfred Barrat the Museum of Modern Art in New York.James was also among the earliest champions of female Surrealist artists, including Carrington, Fini, and Dorothea Tanning. He also supported the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew throughout the 1930s and 1940s by regularly acquiring his art, including The Whirlwind (1939, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Between 1935 and 1939, James transformed his London townhouse on Wimpole Street and Monkton House in West Dean into Surrealist environments through the juxtaposition and display of his collections. After encountering Magritte’s work at the 1936 London exhibition, James commissioned the relatively unknown Belgian artist to create three large paintings for the ballroom of his London home: The Red Model (1937; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), Youth Illustrated (1937;Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), and On the Threshold of Liberty (1937; The Art Institute of Chicago). He devised an elaborate installation for these works, installing them behind two-way mirrors so they appeared only when electric lights behind the mirrors were illuminated. Magritte painted two portraits of James: Not to Be Reproduced (1937; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James, 1937; The Edward James Foundation, Sussex). James also undertook an ambitious collaboration with Dalí the following year, realizing Dalí’s designs for a “Surrealist house” by painting the façade of Monkton House a shocking shade of lilac and adding acid green and black-tiled trim. Working with interior designer Syrie Maugham, he commissioned the British design firm Green & Abbott to produce several of Dalí’s designs for furniture, including pink satin and red wool sofas in the shape of American film star Mae West’s lips and an edition of red as well as white Lobster Telephones. Throughout 1938, James provided Dalí with a salary in exchange for the acquisition of more than 120 paintings and works on paper. He also financed the artist’s “Dream of Venus”pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939.

James traveled throughout North America for the duration of the Second World War. In 1941, he visited the home of American collector Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico, where he formed an enduring friendship with the British painter Dorothy Brett, from whom he purchased several paintings. Between 1941 and 1945, James split his time between Los Angeles and Mexico City. In Mexico, he socialized with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Eva Sulzer, and other artists and intellectuals within the “Dyn circle,” so named for their contributions to the avant-garde journal edited by Wolfgang Paalen and funded by Sulzer from 1942 to 1944. In 1945, James purchased a former coffee plantation situated on eighty acres in the remote rainforest village of Xilitla in Mexico, where he worked for more than three decades to create a fantastical garden landscape called “Los Pozas” (The Pools). Between 1959 and 1979, he spent an estimated five million dollars in order to fund the project, ultimately relying on the sale of his collection.

In 1964, he established the Edward James Foundation, and transferred the West Dean Estate to a charitable educational trust in order to start West Dean College, a school of the arts devoted to conservation, craft, and the preservation of knowledge. He retained Monkton House as a private residence, returning intermittently to facilitate the loan and sale of art to museums either directly or through auction, including the Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Between 1977 and 1979, the Rotterdam museum acquired thirteen paintings from James’s collection, including Salvador Dalí’s Spain (1938) and René Magritte’s portrait of James, Not to Be Reproduced (1938). In 1981, James sold a selection of more than two hundred Surrealist paintings at Christie’s London. Upon his death in 1984, Monkton House and James’s private collection were bequeathed to the Edward James Foundation. The house was sold to private buyers, and a substantial portion of the collection within it was dispersed in a landmark sale at Christie’s London comprising more than 2,500 lots. Proceeds from James’s collection continue to sustain West Dean College’s endowment.