Diego Rivera

by Pete Hamill

A biography of the noted Mexican muralist discusses his art, his political ties and beliefs, and his marriage to the painter Frida Kahlo

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, History

207 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Pete Hamill was a novelist, essayist and journalist whose career has endured for more than forty years. He was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1935, the oldest of seven children of immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended Catholic schools as a child. He left school at 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a sheetmetal worker, and then went on to the United States Navy. While serving in the Navy, he completed his high school education. Then, using the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights, he attended Mexico City College in 1956-1957, studying painting and writing, and later went to Pratt Institute. For several years, he worked as a graphic designer. Then in 1960, he went to work as a reporter for the New York Post. A long career in journalism followed. He has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He has served as editor-in-chief of both the Post and the Daily News. As a journalist, he covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and has lived for extended periods in Mexico City, Dublin, Barcelona, San Juan and Rome. From his base in New York he also covered murders, fires, World Series, championship fights and the great domestic disturbances of the 1960s, and wrote extensively on art, jazz, immigration and politics. He witnessed the events of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath and wrote about them for the Daily News.

At the same time, Hamill wrote much fiction, including movie and TV scripts. He published nine novels and two collections of short stories. His 1997 novel, Snow in August, was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months. His memoir, A Drinking Life, was on the same New York Times list for 13 weeks. He has published two collections of his journalism (Irrational Ravings and Piecework), an extended essay on journalism called News Is a Verb, a book about the relationship of tools to art, a biographical essay called Why Sinatra Matters, dealing with the music of the late singer and the social forces that made his work unique. In 1999, Harry N. Abrams published his acclaimed book on the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. His novel, Forever, was published by Little, Brown in January 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller. His most recently published novel was North River (2007).

In 2004, he published Downtown: My Manhattan, a non-fiction account of his love affair with New York, and received much critical acclaim. Hamill was the father of two daughters, and has a grandson. He was married to the Japanese journalist, Fukiko Aoki, and they divided their time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Author photo by David Shankbone (September 2007) - permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

Reviews

[Pat Lawlor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great companion to a visit to Detroit's Institute of Arts to savor and understand the room of frescoes that he painted in 1933. Stunning! Great companion reading!

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pete Hamill paints a brutally honest portrait of Diego Rivera – a coward and a womanizer who was loyal to the communist ideas till his deathbed and who loved his motherland’s history. The man who painted non-stop and who left his giant footprint in both Mexico and US and made his art available to the masses.

Communist ideas came with a price.
Rivera was in love with the Soviet Union, and yet the Reds did not let him do the murals there. He was a hard-core communist, yet his support of Trotsky caused a separation from the Stalinist party.

Women in Diego's Life.
Several of Rivera’s wives were artists. With exception of Frida Kahlo, we know little about their art. Angelina Beloff and Marie (Marevna) Vorobieff were Russian-born painters whom he met in Europe. Guadalupe Marin and Frida Kahlo were Mexicans. Each of them dealt with multiple betrayals. In many cases, they were either pregnant or just had children when Diego was moving on to the next muse.

The traces of cowardness and egocentricity.
Rivera chose to go to Europe to improve his art skills, while his compadres Siqueiros and Orozco were defending their country during the Mexican revolution of 1910. In a way, Rivera felt guilty transcribing his feelings into the works depicting the events of the revolution. Another example of his not-so-brave behavior was the immediate escape when the attempt on Trotsky’s life was made at Frida and Rivera’s house, leaving Frida to deal with the aftermath alone.

The paradox: a pro-communist painter got to work on murals in 3 major US cities.
How did he manage to do so? Hamill implies that Rivera was a US informer, which might explain his presence in the heart of capitalism. Rivera managed to leave a huge footprint in Detroit painting the walls with his view of the auto industry. Yet, some of his works in New York were destroyed partially because of the image showing the bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.

Rivera’s greatest works are murals. The medium is the most accessible to public view, just like the communist artist wanted.
• Creation is somewhat a condensed version of human history. While the story might be familiar, the characters are unmistakably Mexican. Rivera inserted an image of his second wife Lupe into this mural.
• Man at the Crossroads commissioned by Rockefeller and later destroyed. However, an almost identical copy of it is still in Mexico. It is called Man, Controller of the Universe.
• The Arsenal is a depiction of the Mexican revolution. Lots of famous faces of that era made it to the mural – Frida, Trotsky, Siqueiros, and Mella.
• Detroit Industry was based on the workers of Ford Motor Company and supporting industries. Rivera’s touch is a combination of industrial motives with Aztec mythology. He incorporates the goddess, the mother of the sun, and the moon. There is still a debate about whether this move was to show the show that Aztec culture was more important than technology or whether the was a symbiotic relationship between the spiritual and technological aspects.
• Allegory of (riches) California in San Francisco – the combination of agriculture and industry, with a goddess at the center....

[Angelica Esquivel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the way this book was written--the author had a nice way of balancing his own opinions and takes on art history with objective fact, which made the book readable and informative. I also enjoyed physically carrying this book around. The shape, weight, and cover design were all really satisfying to me for some reason.

[Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish this book had more pictures, but otherwise this was a well-written, readable and enjoyable history book with some great art images and a fun, interesting perspective on the events in Mexico, Europe and the United States from 1900 through the 1950's. Diego Rivera was a bastard to some people, and seems so single-minded about art that I wondered while reading this book if he might have had Asperger's or something. Still, he had a complex and successful life that comes through nicely in Pete Hamill's story. More photos, not just of art, but of the people involved in this story would have been helpful. Many artists' names are mentioned that are not well known to the average reader, and some sort of visual references would have been nice, photos of what these people were creating that made them influential for Rivera, or that made them similar enough to him to hang out with him. And, photos of the artists and other people in this story would have been nice to make the sections about his artistic development more than just a list of names. A modern reader does have the Internet, though, and with a little effort there are many images available online. Overall this was a very good book, highly recommended.

[Ed Smiley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is vary breezy and fresh in its style. Totally free of pretension. The author lets you know exactly what they think, in some cases declaring a masterwork, and in others a shoddy job. And pretty frank about Rivera's self fictionalizing promotional fantasies. Mexico was a pretty politically turbulent place, and some of the fictions and self reinvention were for personal and professional survival.

Very good selection of illustrations

[Susan Liston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Artists are always interesting, for better or worse, and Diego was a bit of both. This book was concise...would have been nice to have more pictures, but the reproduction quality of the ones that are there is excellent.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great author. Not sure about Rivera.

[Karina]

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