Walls, Dreams & Women

THE FABULOUS LIFE OF DIEGO RIVERA by Bertram D. Wolfe. 457 pages. Stein & Day. $10.

The lies Diego Rivera told were as sweeping as his murals: vast, colorful and complicated. They charmed women, infuriated men (Trotsky left Diego's home, bag and baggage, after one tall tale too many), and were a biographer's despair. "Who could be so discourteous," asks Biographer Wolfe, "who so foolish and dully matter-of-fact, as to disbelieve such attractive, exciting, baroquely designed, richly detailed, marvelously verisimilar yet preposterous stories, told while the painter smiled and snorted, his bulging eyes fastened directly upon one's own?"

Wolfe could. A friend of Diego's since the 1920s, when both were members of the Communist Party, and later --after his disenchantment--a brilliant writer on Communism (Three Who Made a Revolution), Bertram Wolfe in this biography has tried to untangle fact from fantasy. And yet the lies of this great, hulking 300 Ibs. of a man, believes Wolfe, are the key to his life and art. His dreams were more real to him than reality, and to him, all ideas were playthings. Said his third wife, Frida Kahlo: "He never told a lie that was stupid or banal."

A People's Art. Diego reconstructed his childhood to suit his mood. Born in the silver-mining town of Guanajuato and brought up in Mexico City, Diego recalled that at the age of four he was denouncing Christianity to his horrified elders; at a slightly older age, he claimed that he made 5,000 toy Russian soldiers out of cardboard to do battle with capitalists. There is no doubting, however, his early aptitude for art. At ten he was enrolled in art school, and at 21 he won a scholarship to study in Europe, where he spent 13 years imitating the masters and searching for a style of his own. In Paris he discovered cubism and turned out many fashionably cubist paintings. He also discovered women, who were violently attracted to this massive, whimsical "Mexican cowboy" who seldom bathed. He kept two mistresses at the same time and had children by both.

Eventually Diego tired of bohemia. He found its art too constricting and esoteric; he longed for an art that could be shared by a whole community, much as the Italian frescoes had once been shared in times gone by. Then he began to hear stories out of Russia about Communism, which promised to restore art, among many other things, to the masses. Diego returned home to Mexico in 1921 full of plans to produce a people's art.

Luckily, the new Mexican Minister of Education, Jose Vasconcelos, was of like mind; he provided Diego with plenty of public walls. Squatting on a scaffold that sagged perilously under his enormous bulk, a cigar clamped between his teeth, Diego painted exuberantly from dawn to dusk. His only diversion was the women who gathered below to watch him work. Over the years he made love to scores of them, including a tigress-tempered beauty named Guadalupe Marin, who once tore up several of his paintings in a fit of jealousy and on another occasion threatened to shoot off his right arm.

Diego put a whole history of Mexico on the walls of the Education Building and the National Palace. The paintings are full of Marxism, but they owe much more to Diego's vision of a glorious golden age of Mexico before the Spanish conquest. Karl Marx's glowering visage crowns one mural, but it seems flat and lifeless beside the rich, raw portrait of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps more than the work of any other artist, writes Wolfe, these murals succeed in expressing "a land and an age."

Machines Like Nudes. The masses did not take to Diego's murals as they were supposed to. They dubbed his squat figures "monkeys" and coined an apt word to describe the murals: feismo (uglyism). In the presidential election campaign of 1923-24, one candidate made a promise to whitewash the murals, and others took up the cry. Diego's work was saved only by the critics. New York and French critics wrote such glowing reviews that Diego's fellow countrymen grudgingly gave in and agreed to live with the murals.

North of the border, Diego was the rage. In the 1930s, U.S. art was in the doldrums, and the Mexicans--Rivera, along with Orozco and Siqueiros--seemed fresh and exciting; here were artists with a social conscience. Diego was commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. In spite of his Communist beliefs, Rivera fell in love with U.S. industrial might and produced a massive mural of curving, convoluted machinery that has the sensuousness of nudes.

Next, Diego went to New York, at the invitation of young (then 25) Nelson Rockefeller, to paint a mural for the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller had been warned: Diego had once painted his grandfather, old John D., devouring ticker tape. RCA officials grew more and more nervous as they saw red flags and sickle-swinging workers taking shape before their eyes. When Lenin's face appeared. Nelson Rockefeller requested another face instead. Diego refused, and the "Battle of Radio City" was joined. In the words of Diego, "a platoon of sappers, hidden in ambush, charged upon the scaffold." They routed Diego and his "proletarian" assistants and draped the whole mural. Nine months later, the Rockefellers had the mural pounded to bits. U.S. capitalists had had enough of their Communist painter.

Diego returned to Mexico, where in time he mellowed--and so did his talent. He tried to make peace with his enemies, who by this time included almost everybody. In bad odor with the Communist Party for consorting with the capitalists, Diego got back in the party's good graces by doing a flattering portrait of Stalin. In 1956, the year before Diego's death, he journeyed to the Soviet Union, where he claimed he had been miraculously cured of cancer (he also reported witnessing a marvelous experiment in which a white man had been produced in the ninth generation of crossings between Negroes and Mongols).

The same year Diego made his peace with the church. One of his murals in Mexico City had been covered for years because of an atheistic inscription: "God Does Not Exist." At rush hour one evening, Diego ostentatiously mounted a scaffold and blotted out the words. "I am a Catholic," he announced from his perch to the startled throng below. Diego was a great ham to the end.

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