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Profile explores muralist
Sunday, March 14,
1999
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of
Diego Rivera
by Patrick Marnham. Knopf. 350 pages. $35.
In New York City in April 1933,
Diego Rivera was painting a heroic image of Lenin on the
side of the RCA building. The Rockefellers, who owned the
building and had hired the Mexican artist to paint the mural
in which the Russian Marxist appeared, were somewhat
surprised. Rivera was taken off the job, demonstrators
gathered in the streets daily to protest his removal, and in
the end the mural was destroyed, on a cold night in February
1934.
The full story is much more
complicated than a brief summary can convey, and one of the
strengths of Patrick Marnham's biography is its willingness
to investigate the vague areas of Rivera's life, to verify
or refute other accounts of what happened - including
Rivera's own. Where other biographers have more readily
accepted Rivera's versions as accurate, Marnham tells us,
for instance, that Rivera did not play a role in the Mexican
revolution of the early 1900s despite the painter's claims
to the contrary.
Investigating the degrees of truth
and invention in the myths surrounding Rivera requires a
narrative approach that may feel digressive but can't help
itself for being so. If frustrating in terms of storytelling
(one wants the story to continue), exploring hypothetical
and conflicting accounts helps the biography achieve a
balanced, more accurate portrait of the
artist-revolutionary.
In any case, for readers interested
in 20th-century art and radicalism, Rivera's life holds more
than enough fascination. In Paris in the teens, he was
friends with and later critical of Picasso; in Mexico in the
'30s, he helped hide and later had a falling out with
Trotsky. Indeed, Rivera's many marriages and extramarital
affairs make "Melrose Place" look rather tame by
comparison.
Whether painting murals for
capitalists or for Communists, cheating on or working with
Frida Kahlo (his third wife and an accomplished artist in
her own right), Rivera led a life full of turbulence,
inspiration and interest. Marnham does a fine job in
gathering the clamorous details, and the result is a
biography worthy of its subject.
PHIL NEL
(Phil
Nel is an adjunct professor of English at the College of
Charleston.)
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