Ceci n’est pas une pipe dream…

There are some art objects so singular and subliminal – think Méret Oppenheim’s furry tea-cup – that it’s hard to imagine them being made at all: less designed than induced. Many of the pieces that spring to mind – these things that defy thingness – are by Surrealists, those masters of dredging up the props the subconscious makes for a laugh which, for most of us, sink back into the ooze on waking. Imagine those totemic Dalí objects: that ‘Lobster Telephone’, his massive pink-lips sofa. They leave you wondering: what room they could possibly be at home in? Who could live with these things and get away with it?

The answer is Edward James. A pivotal patron of Surrealism from the 1930s through to the 1980s, he was the man who made these fancies real – and, indeed, part of the furniture. In Monkton House (WoI May 1998), the family home in the South Downs for which the pieces were commissioned, he would have put his feet up on movie star Mae West’s pout and seen crustacean jeopardy at the end of the phone chord. The Spanish artist’s ‘Champagne Lamp’ and sinister ‘Cat’s Cradle Hand Chair’ were also collaborative fantasies conjured for the house, which is today part of West Dean College. It’s a lively mental image, these strange thought experiments come home to roost – but now, to mark the centenary of the movement, for the first time visitors will be able to see his holdings in the flesh and in context. Starting this month, guided tours will bring to life the various Surreal inhabitants of the patron’s spaces (chiefly Monkton and James’s London house at 35 Wimpole Street) and his extraordinary collection, including paintings and sketches by Dalí, René Magritte, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Jean Cocteau.

‘Together, these records of Edward James’s many ideas and his Surrealist interiors capture his unbounded fantasy world,’ says Hugh Morrison, collections manager at the college. ‘One where his dreams and imagination could freely live.’ Live being the operative word. James’s perspective connects these different artists so evocatively because it makes their weird worlds habitable – and never more so than when laid out, as they will be from 29 October, among the warm, wood-panelled rooms of West Dean College, the fortification he created to protect them.

Another red thread is bodies. ‘You can see everywhere his fascination for bringing the corporeal into interior design: there are lips, of course, hands – as well as the “Cat’s Cradle Hand Chair”, Dalí created a tea service patterned with disembodied pink gloves – and feet, in the form of the “Tilly Losch Footprint” carpet.’ Two of these were modelled on his wife, the Austrian-born ballerina for which he named that latter piece: her manual poise in the curiously captivating ‘Dance of the Hands’ – filmed, and well worth a Google – haunts the chair user’s back, while the stairwell carpet at Monkton was woven to set in amber her trail of wet footprints after a bath. (When this brief marriage fell apart, James had this replaced with one of his dog’s tracks, on the grounds it was more loyal.)

Even the ‘Champagne Lamp’, a stack of coupes supporting its shade, suggests a spine – and lobsters and telephones both screamed sex for Dalí. Archival details shore up these bodily thrills rather than rendering them dustier. One drawing by an unknown Surrealist friend proposes a drawer design supported by a grotesque pair of legs with one shared foot and 14 toes; in another, a bird-person with scissors for genitals seems, by her sash, to have won the 1948 ‘Miss Lemon Squash’. There’s something irresistibly seductive about those big pink lips being designed on the back of an envelope.

Even at their most absurd, the dreaminess of these things is reified by learning just how made they are – how bound up Surrealism is, in fact, with craft. That handsy stool, named for the finger-interlacing game ‘cat’s cradle’, dares you to complete it with string, and so give it a woven back. There is an inventor’s sensibility – and engineering acumen – frequently on display across the movement. James, for one, ‘had a fascination for fantastical architecture – visitors will be able to look at many of his unrealised building projects.’ A sketch for a pavilion named ‘Artichoke House’ particularly piques the curiosity.

One of the ambitious patron’s projects that did come to pass, of course, was the college itself: bequeathing his own estate, James established it as a centre for education and training in conservation and craft practices, hoping to conserve methods he feared would be lost to time. Much brilliant stuff is still being made here today – more furniture and sculpture, plus leather, instruments, jewellery and clocks (of the non-melting kind). Excitingly, two short courses, including one in textile sculpture, starting this October over in Bloomsbury have an explicit tie to the movement James so loved. It’s a giddy notion that you can go somewhere to learn how to make Surrealist automata in 2024.

One can’t help but be energised to see Surrealist craft alive and well in the estate of a man who, nearly 100 years ago, was so game about it; who made matter from mayhem. It’s a moving thought, too, that ‘all students are invited to engage with the things we hold here’, as Hugh explains. ‘The collections and archives are actively used as a source of inspiration for art, making, design projects, conservation and creative writing.’ More dreams rescued from waking.

For further information on how to book a West Dean Surrealism tour or one of the Surrealist courses, visit westdean.ac.uk

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