A Cézanne-Like Vision of Peaches

Lorna Scott Fox

• Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by Patrick Marnham
  Bloomsbury, 368 pp, £12.99, November 1999, ISBN 0 7475 4450 6
• Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals by Linda Bank Downs
  Norton, 202 pp, £35.00, March 2000, ISBN 0 393 04529 3

At last a full-length biography of the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera: a famously fat, genial, enigmatic and ruthless man, with the politician’s mix of idealism and opportunism; an artist on the loose in the public world who made his mark on the first half of the 20th century. Following Bertram Wolfe’s political portrait of 1939, most of the reassessments have lain hidden in scholarly monographs, and Rivera is chiefly remembered these days as the husband of Frida Kahlo, Gender Studies’ emblematic victim – not least because it was Rivera who received all the attention during their lifetime. It’s a shame, then, that this book provides so little analysis of his impact on American culture, both north and south of the border.