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.