Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera [Anglais] [Broché]

What confidence and ambition it requires to approach a biography of Diego Rivera, the larger-than-life Mexican muralist who in recent years has been reduced, in some circles, to being known as Frida Kahlo's evil husband. The myths and mysteries begin at his birth, in 1884. His mother seemed to die just after Diego, a firstborn twin, emerged, and her body was laid out for burial, until an old servant insisted she was still breathing. She recovered fully (Diego's twin died at age 2). This macabre event was but the first in a fabulously eventful life.

Under the brutal regime of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, whose legacy included human slavery on an unprecedented scale, Mexico City became "The Paris of the Americas," with imperial palaces, European music, and decorations by artists who had studied under Ingres. "It was in this exuberant, chaotic, and occasionally dangerous world that Diego Rivera grew up," writes Patrick Marnham, who casts a spell of such strangeness, beauty, and black humor that the reader is utterly hooked by the end of the first few pages. Marnham repeats and analyses all the fables Rivera spun about himself and his family; he describes Rivera's enchantment with Italian fresco cycles and his friendship and rivalry with Picasso in Montmartre in the 1920s; he reports Rivera's countless amorous conquests; and he presents the supposedly feminist view of Rivera as a monster of appetite, arrogance, and authority. Marnham also does an excellent job of picking apart the personal, political, and artistic threads of the disastrous brouhaha over Rivera's Rockefeller Center murals. In prose that is poetically rich and frequently tinged with not-so-gentle irony, he has written a thoroughly believable book about an all but unbelievable life. --Peggy Moorman --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

From the salons of Europe before the Great War to the walls of post-revolutionary Mexico, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) left behind a legacy that was larger than life in every way. Everything about the "bebe monstrueux," as Rivera was nicknamed by his mentor, the art critic Elie Faure, was huge: his size, his artistic output, the number of his mistresses and, as Marnham (The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon) demonstrates, his capacity for self-invention. Retracing the steps of writers who've tackled Rivera's life and times before him, Marnham attempts to separate the facts from the fables surrounding the man. Throughout, he provides just enough context so that the backdrop against which Rivera lived his peripatetic, even swashbuckling life?the Spain of Alfonso XIII and the "free republic of Montparnasse," where, surrounded by such artists as Picasso and Modigliani, Rivera flirted with cubism before turning to large-scale, figurative tributes to socialism and Mexican history?assumes its proper proportion. Marnham's considerable research also permits him to demonstrate just how Rivera kept his political and commercial interests alive, at least until he matched wits with the developers of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, who destroyed a mural they had commissioned because it included a portrait of Lenin. Especially helpful is his synopsis of the work of Faure, whose conviction that the future of art lay in a rebirth of the Italian fresco tradition of public art changed the painter's life. In recent years, Rivera has been somewhat overshadowed by the attention paid to one of his wives, artist Frida Kahlo. This thoroughly engrossing biography, which is the first on Rivera since Bertram Wolfe revised his seminal study in 1963, begins to redress the imbalance. Sixteen color and 32 b&w illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

For the browsing public as well as specialists in European, Latin American, and American modern art, this book is not to be overlooked. Marnham (The Man Who Wasn't Maigret, LJ 5/1/93) masters a tumultuous life lived to the fullest by genius Mexican nationalist/Communist muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). A highly successful artist and unrestrained womanizer, Rivera constantly mythologized his life when the bald truth was astonishing enough. Producing a biographical essay on him has apparently been difficult; Marnham's is the first in 40 years. Comprehensive, quotable, and controversial in its treatment of the artists whose lives Rivera crossed, this work is quite detailed, especially through 1929, when he married his equal, Frida Kahlo. (She reconfirmed his fame by painting him as her subject.) Unfortunately, there are no footnotes, and Marnham ends by cautioning, "Rivera's autobiography has to be decoded and submitted to chronological investigation." Nevertheless, this work is highly recommended.AMary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"We're not precisely meant to like the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) after reading Patrick Marnham's urbane and entertaining biography, Dreaming with His Eyes Open, but it's hard not to find him compelling in the way that roguish, larger-than-life characters can be."

"Marnham's assiduously researched, wide-ranging and learned account of Rivera's life [is] the first full-scale biography published in over 35 years. . . . Rivera's ability to create a potent mythological representation of the Mexican experience based on Aztec archetypes was, according to Marnham, the key to his success and the source of his power as an artist."

Vast in scope and detailed in execution, this biography evokes the artist with an ambitiousness he surely would have recognized. Most people recall Diego Rivera as a painter of complex, highly symbolic and politically charged murals; few know he was equally inventive with his own life. In writing this biographythe first of Rivera in some 35 yearsMarnham has undertaken a formidable challenge: pulling apart fact and fantasy. Rivera's own friend, Bertram Wolfe (who wrote the only other biography existent) referred to the lies Rivera told as the ``labyrinth of fables.'' The artist claimed, for example, that at age 11 he enlisted as the youngest soldier in the Mexican army and that as an art student in Mexico City, he fell in with a crowd of medical students who regularly dined on the flesh of their cadavers. Marnham does an excellent job debunking these myths. In their place, he offers a compellingand even somewhat sympatheticportrait of Rivera as a talented, hardworking young painter who evolved into a fervent communist and blustering egomaniac. His appetites were huge; so was his ambition: Rivera was powered by a desire to make paintings with relevance to Mexico's political present as well as its past and future. To his credit, Marnham skillfully describes the complex spheres of power, influence, idealism, and corruption that influenced the communist movement in the 1920s and the artist himself. Nor does he slight Rivera's emotional life: he duly notes virtually all of Rivera's known paramours and wives (Frida Kahlo was, after all, his third). But somehow, Marnham never quite manages to convey the strange passion that must have bound Kahlo to this huge, fleshy, forceful, adulterous man. Their interaction, while grounded in their art, seems clinical: dependent and passionate, but distant. Marnham excels as a biographer of history and personality, less so as a biographer of creativity and obsession. But all of those qualities were integral to Riveras life. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

This fascinating biography--the first in over forty years--of Diego Rivera, the brilliant Mexican artist and revolutionary (and twice-married husband of Frida Kahlo), captures the explosively passionate nature that made Rivera one of this century's most gifted and controversial painters.
Drawing on his extensive travels and research, Patrick Marnham explores a character who was, in every sense, larger than life. We are introduced to the rural Mexico, full of mystery and turbulence, that shapes the enormously imaginative young Rivera's worldview--and a place that would remain his most enduring creative influence. We see the young apprentice leave Mexico for Spain on a government grant and then go on to Italy, where he first encounters the work of the great fresco painters that will change his life and art forever; to Paris, where he settles in Montparnasse at the epicenter of the legendary artistic circle living there at the time, including Picasso (both his great friend and his rival), Modigliani, Matisse, Léger and Braque. We see Rivera travel to Moscow to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and begin his lifelong flirtation with Communism. And by 1930, with his young wife, Frida Kahlo, Rivera finally makes his way to North America, where he is to work on three major
mural projects--one of which, commissioned by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller for the new Rockefeller Center, will end in disaster and furious international controversy for the artist, and force his return to Mexico.
Throughout we are witness to Rivera's immense passions--his countless lovers, his stormy relationship with Frida Kahlo, his political bravado, his
massive strength and maniacal work ethic--which fueled his highest artistic achievements and made for an extraordinarily complex life. Marnham conveys to us the impact of this galvanic force that was Rivera's creative drive and personality, and shows why he was perhaps the greatest muralist since the Renaissance. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Drawing from his own travels, Marnham explores Mexico, the deeply mysterious world that was Rivera's greatest influence and the explosively passionate nature that made him one this century's most gifted and controversial painters. of illustrations, 16 in full color. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Patrick Marnham's books include Fantastic Invasion: Dispatches from Africa; The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon, which won the Marsh Biography Award and was nominated for a 1994 Edgar Allen Poe Award; and So Far from God: A Journey to Central America, which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.