A Life Of Diego Rivera
In this biography of Diego Rivera, one of the greatest muralists of the 20th century, Patrick Marnham skillfully untangles the truth from the web of lies that Diego Rivera told about himself.
Despite his colourful claims, Rivera was not actually raised by a magical nurse who let him roam the forest, nor thrown out of the Church at the age of six for blasphemy. After studying in Mexico and painting in Spain, Rivera became a key figure in the heyday of Montparnasse. The free love and exploding aesthetics of Paris, the First World War, Diego's brief study of Renaissance public art in Italy and his return to Mexico as a rising muralist are brilliantly captured. And we follow his changing political allegiance from Mexican revolutionary to communist, to Trotskyist and then to Stalinist, as well as his even more erratic love life - which only his third wife Frida Kahlo could match for infidelities.
Diego mythologized not only himself, but endowed the Mexican people with a national myth; melding a troubled revolutionary history and an Indian culture obsessed with death into something bold and visionary.
