Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera.

Patrick Marnham Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 344 pp. Donna Gustafson

Arguably the greatest mural painter of the twentieth century, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera was also a superb storyteller and a man who relished the attention of the press, the public, and beautiful women. The biographies of Rivera and his third wife, the painter Frida Kahlo, are surrounded by fables, some invented by themselves, others the result of their being stars in the international political wars that consumed so many intellectuals and artists between the two world wars. The difficult task that Patrick Marnham set himself in this book was to put all this aside and tell "the real journey made by the industrious young state bursar of the Porfiriato, the boy whose father was ruined, whose mother was impossible, but who had genius."

Marnham succeeds admirably in presenting a factual account of Rivera's life, and in describing his development into a politically engaged artist of significant stature. Full of fascinating and richly narrated detail, this slyly humorous book will be of interest not simply to those who hope to understand the enigmatic Rivera, but also to those who want to know more about his life with Kahlo, and anyone interested in the grand alliance between art and politics that was the Mexican Mural Movement.

Marnham reveals that Rivera was born, like so many of the rebels of twentieth-century art, into fairly comfortable middle-class circumstances and received an academic, thoroughly European training in art. He did not fight in the Mexican Revolution, nor was he a youthful insurgent at the academy as he liked to claim. He studied hard, did well, and won a scholarship to Europe to further his studies. Marnham takes pains to trace Rivera's course through Europe carefully and develops an account of the young artist's growth that emphasizes decisions made not in the service of aesthetics, but in order to gain critical attention. The author discusses Rivera's cubist period as an ambitious experiment (while short-lived, it marked his first recognition as an artist of talent) and reconstructs a series of quarrels that led to Rivera's abandonment of cubism and the Paris art world. Then convincingly Marnham credits the art historian Elie Faure not only with promoting Rivera's decision to travel to Italy to study the murals of the Renaissance, but with instilling in Rivera a genuine political ambition for his art. These discussions demythologize the great artist and present the young Rivera as an eccentric, hydrophobic character of questionable emotional and intellectual maturity.

Similarly, Marnham strips away any glamour that we might associate with the Mexican Revolution by relating the facts of the ten-year uprising. He also traces the continuities between the Porfiriato and the revolutionary government that was in place when Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921, by which time the revolution had already been betrayed. Having missed it entirely, the artist found himself at a disadvantage and hastened to become a revolutionary-after-the-fact. A study trip to the Yucatan opened his eyes to the Indian cultures of Mexico and enthusiasm for the ideals of the revolution, and led to his first government commission. From that point on, there was no stopping him.

To say that Rivera led an "unusual life," as Marnham does, is an understatement. He survived death threats in Mexico and the United States and battled heroically in both countries to save his murals from harm. He traveled throughout Europe, to Moscow to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and with Kahlo, north of the border to "win acceptance for his politics as well as his art." In the United States, the Riveras were simultaneously courted by the rich and famous and castigated for their politics; their adventures provide ample opportunity for wise and witty commentary. Quoting directly from the participants instead of relying on stale interpretation, the author reconstructs the battles between Rivera and the Rockefellers (Rivera lost and his mural in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center was destroyed) and between Rivera and his unlikely ally, Edsel Ford, against his foes in Detroit (Rivera's mural at the Detroit Art Institute, one of the artist's masterpieces, stands).

Possibly of the greatest interest to many readers will be the relationship between Kahlo and Rivera that serves as the backbone of the second half of the book. Marnham falters somewhat in his attempts to plumb the depths of their symbiotic closeness and in explaining what he vaguely refers to as their "common imagination." Still, there are moments of real insight and it is important to be reminded that Rivera first bought his German-Jewish-Spanish-Mexican wife the Indian costumes and jewelry that became her signature dress. In this detail is buried much of significance of the relationship between the two, including their mythic status inside and outside Mexico and, not least, evidence of the couple's canny manipulation of imagery and identity. Marnham also tries to balance the Riveras' infidelities by discussing many of Kahlo's betrayals, the most famous being the affair that she initiated with Trotsky under the eyes of his protector in Mexico, Diego Rivera. When the truth slipped out (Marnham suggests that Kahlo made that inevitable) Rivera reacted by withdrawing his support from Trotsky - although never breaking with him politically - leaving the already doomed exile to his fate. This sequence is expertly narrated in a chapter aptly titled, "A Surrealist Deathtrap." Here as elsewhere, it is Marnham's political astuteness and wit that clarify the muddiest of intrigues - how else to comprehend a series of events that include the visit of the French surrealist leader Andre Breton and his wife, the political assassination of Trotsky, the Riveras' divorce (they later remarried), the arrest of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, the death of the Italian photographer Tina Modotti, and much more.

The awkward moments in the book have to do, inevitably, with the author's desire to augment the artist's psychological profile through an analysis of his paintings and murals. While art historians routinely sift through an artist's life to explain aspects of his or her work, there are few instances when art can provide information to explain human motivations. The truth that one finds in any painting is two-dimensional, no matter how well constructed to reflect the three-dimensional world it may be. Still, this account of the most famous of los tres Grandes (Rivera, Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco) provides more insight into what really made Rivera the man he was than any other book to date, and it does so with great intelligence and subtle wit.

Donna Gustafson is curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts.