Diego Rivera Quotes | Famous Quotations About Art, Love, & Life
Who is Diego Rivera?
Diego Rivera was a noteworthy figure artist in twentieth-century art. He was energetic about painting since adolescence and started seeking art in Mexico's Academy of San Carlos when he was ten. Rivera spent a decent segment of his grown-up life in Europe and the United States.
Diego Rivera Famous Quotations:
Diego Rivera Quotes About Art
“As an artist, I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.” ― Diego Rivera
“Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from pride in mere talent.” ― Diego Rivera
“In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements -- a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room.” ― Diego Rivera
“All art is propaganda. ... The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can't just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. ... Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. ... Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. ... I want to use my art as a weapon.” ― Diego Rivera
“To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life.” ― Diego Rivera
“The rôle of the artist is that of a soldier of the revolution.” ― Diego Rivera
“Art is like ham-it nourishes people.” ― Diego Rivera
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Diego Rivera Self-portrait
“I know now that he who hopes to be universal in his art must plant in his own soil. Great art is like a tree, which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit, and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the entire world, because taste is rooted in nature. When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters Michelangelo, Cezanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.” ― Diego Rivera
“Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste.” ― Diego Rivera
“Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.” ― Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera Quotes About Love
“An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’t capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.” ― Diego Rivera
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View of Toledo by Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera Quotes About Frida Kahlo
“I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and as profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.” ― Diego Rivera
“July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.” ― Diego Rivera
“If I ever loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.” ― Diego Rivera
“Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did.” ― Diego Rivera
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Zapatista Landscape –The Guerrilla by Diego Rivera
“Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.” ― Diego Rivera
“I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And would continue to be, up to the moment she died, 27 years later.” ― Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera Quotes About Life
“From sunrise to sunset, I was in the forest, sometimes far from the house, with my goat who watched me as a mother does a child. All the animals in the forest became my friends, even dangerous and poisonous ones. Thanks to my goat-mother and my Indian nurse, I have always enjoyed the trust of animals--a precious gift. I still love animals infinitely more than human beings.” ― Diego Rivera
“I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.” ― Diego Rivera
“As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford's industrial empire kept passing before my eyes. In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form.” ― Diego Rivera
“I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever-expanding victories be won against death.” ― Diego Rivera
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Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera
“Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.” ― Diego Rivera
“While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.” ― Diego Rivera
“I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun." ― Diego Rivera
“Fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and it exists only to exploit people and to obtain an economic gain” ― Diego Rivera
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The Detroit Industry Fresco Cycle by Diego Rivera
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