Rivera's Life

DIEGO RIVERA, His LIFE AND TIMES--Bertram D. Wolfe--Knopf ($6).

Six years ago in a crowded little top floor room on Manhattan's 14th Street, Painter John Sloan and Walter Pach joined in bestowing on hulking, frog-faced Diego Rivera the title of "People's Artist of America." The ceremony and the investiture were of little avail. Rivera never again laid brush to wet plaster in the U. S.

If Diego Rivera has not since been forgotten in the U. S. it is thanks to two beautiful frescoes in San Francisco, one in Detroit, and at least partly to the writings of his faithful friend, Bertram David Wolfe.* Last week Wolfe paid Rivera, now 52, the greater tribute of a biography.

The book skimps none of the realities in the life of a master realist. At five, having been carefully deceived as to the manner of birth of his sister Maria, Diego was discovered in the kitchen making an incision into a mouse's belly. At eight, he caused even greater consternation when he and Maria were found playing house with the doll-like corpse of a brother who died in infancy.

Rivera had his first taste of revolution in the Mexican revolt of 1910, when such folk heroes as Zapata and Pancho Villa swept the land with fantasy. The wave receded; Mexico slept again; Rivera went to Paris and for ten years labored at Cubism in Montparnasse. He found his true style on his return, in his great Mexican frescoes. First with a beautiful, pantherish model named Guadalupe Marin and later with pretty Frida Kahlo, Rivera lived an active revolutionary life until 1929, when the Communist Party expelled him.

Now a sort of honored ward of the Mexican Government, fat, fearless Diego Rivera still figures in many a hot political controversy. But whatever their politics, art lovers agree that Rivera is the foremost muralist of his time.

*Portrait of America (1934), Portrait of Mexico (1937).

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