The subtitle for Hilary Masters' book on Mexican muralist Juan O'Gorman is a little disingenuous. This small book covers much more territory than that O'Gorman work.

		Meet the author    Hilary Masters will discuss "Shadows on a Wall" and sign copies Thursday from 5-7 p.m. at the University of Pittsburgh Book Center, 4000 Fifth Ave., Oakland.

The story, in brief, is that Masters, who teaches English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University, was visiting an artist's colony in the small town of Patzcuaro, Mexico, in December 2000 and happened upon a mural in the town library.

A well-established writer of fiction, essays and memoirs, Masters came "to browse its collection in the endemic reflex of a writer at loose ends on an easy afternoon in a foreign land."

Masters first learned of muralist and architect O'Gorman while researching his novel, "Home Is the Exile." While his efforts to thoroughly study the mural are thwarted -- in fact, he never sees it again -- his imagination or obsessive curiosity or both are seized, and he begins rooting out the circumstances behind its creation.

The mural represents centuries of Mexican history, dwelling on the violence inflicted by the Spanish, and Masters wants to know more about the man who painted it. He finds, to his surprise, not only that the story takes him back to Pittsburgh, but that the life of O'Gorman shares a few characteristics with his own.

The story behind the story is, in part, how to investigate and write about another's life, and how one can ever keep from writing about oneself.

As Masters says early on, "Those of us who have been brought to this trade argue the notion that in stealing the accoutrements of another life -- for one more transient possession -- we somehow refurbish those details and give them new value. So goes the self-important claim of the con artist, for in truth the object of the adventure has always been to leave behind a semblance of the thief."

The facts are that O'Gorman and his wife, Helen Fowler, spent more than five months in Pittsburgh in 1940 at the invitation of Edgar Kaufmann Jr. and his parents, who commissioned the artist to paint a mural for the YM&WHA building in Oakland.

Masters openly takes license with the known facts, inventing conversations and details based on O'Gorman's diaries and the memories of a few of Fowler's descendants. He speculates about Helen's reaction to the elder Kaufmann ("who looked at her as if she had just shed her clothes,") and plants the idea that his wife, Liliane, may have sought an affair with O'Gorman in revenge for her husband's affairs.

For a reader whose idea of the Kaufmann family is limited to the information imparted by the guides at Fallingwater, the most shocking part of this meditation are the revelations about Kaufmann's open infidelities, his political and social ambitions, and his wife's apparent suicide at the Laurel Highlands retreat.

It is naturally irresistible to dream up a scene -- and Masters does know that O'Gorman and Fowler spent time at Fallingwater. As he cobbles together one summer evening there, forthrightly announcing that he is making it all up, he asks, "Isn't this the process called art?"

Masters' ruminations lead him to conclude that this was the same process O'Gorman used in his Patzcuaro mural, in which he gathers people throughout history and sets them in the scene, even painting himself and Helen gazing out over the mayhem.

O'Gorman's Oakland mural unfortunately never happened, and the business of its commission left a very scant paper trail among Kaufmann's effects. Nevertheless the mural was planned, cartoons were made and a few of those remain. O'Gorman would have painted a Marxist view of the city's history, which fell in with his own opinions but not so much with Kaufmann's, and it is probable that the politics of the piece were what killed it. Fueled by his experience in Pittsburgh, O'Gorman went home and painted the mural at Patzcuaro.

Masters' explorations make for a thought-provoking and entertaining book. He grounds his statements in a well-informed view of social history, to the point that linking the wild Mexican mural with Pittsburgh's own smoggy history does not seem far-fetched at all.