Diego Rivera Quotes

I've never believed in God. But I believe in Picasso.

You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.

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.

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.

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.

you have to trust a TRUE compliment as muc as a critique.

Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent.

was Diego Rivera’s

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.

Toma de la vida todo lo que te dé, sea lo que sea, siempre que te interese y te pueda dar cierto placer.

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.

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.

And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he’d wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en español.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Desperate with the endless tedium, thoughts racing and roving and deepening since they could not find outlet in immediate action, she underwent a profound metamorphosis in character. It is questionable whether the painter known as Frida Kahlo would have existed were it not for that year of suffering and constraint.

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.

Art is the appeal to the instinct of communion in men,” Faure told him. “We recognize one another by the echoes it awakens in us. . . 

Fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and it exists only to exploit people and to obtain an economic gain

He was into the Beat Generation—Bukowski, Ginsberg, and Henry Miller, whom I also loved but found a bit crude. I was more drawn to artists like Anaïs Nin and Frida Kahlo. Their sensitivity. Frida’s sad and painful self-exploration affected me deeply—I read her memoirs and her poetry and have gathered all her writings over the years, learning all I can about her. I was so moved by her artwork, the reflection of her difficult romance. You could sense in her art how she loved and protected Diego Rivera. How she allowed him to be himself at great cost to her own happiness.

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.

Wild Times Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920’s and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were “Fellow Travelers” and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party’s existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, “Frida,” who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico.

Se i miei affreschi di Detroit verranno distrutti, ne proverò un profondo dolore, perché ho messo in loro un anno della mia vita e il meglio del mio talento. Ma domani sarò impegnato a crearne altri, perché non sono semplicemente un "artista", ma piuttosto un uomo che realizza la sua funzione biologica di produrre dei dipinti, come un albero produce fiori e frutti e non si preoccupa di perdere quello che ha fatto ogni anno, perché sa che la prossima stagione ricomincerà a fiorire e a portare frutti.

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

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. 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.

As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera’s [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone.

Rivera’s admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford. By the 1920s and ‘30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford’s engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car; his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly; and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. Kahn, the architect of Ford’s factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford’s industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit’s industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.

From 1926 until her death she would continue to paint and draw numerous self-portraits, bestowing them as binding gifts to her husband, Diego Rivera, and to friends, lovers and admirers, beseeching them to remember her, always.

herself closer to their front door, as if that would hurry her parents along. Her best friend, James, who lived upstairs, would be there any minute with his family to walk with them to Hollister’s bookstore. Emily’s dad carried out a cardboard box that still hadn’t been unpacked, even though the Cranes had lived in San Francisco for three months. He set it in the hall and pulled out a colander, an art book about Diego Rivera, and a wad of fabric that unrolled itself to reveal two ties. He stood in the hallway outside the tiny bathroom and looked at his reflection in the mirror, holding up first the blue tie and then the red one. “These are kind of wrinkly.” Emily’s mom strode out of her bedroom, a long skirt swishing around her ankles and her

Hija de la revolución – ¿Qué coses, mujer? – Un traje de ángel para Frida. – Matilde, la niña pidió un avión, no un ángel. No es lo mismo. – Calla, Guillermo. Ella no sabe lo que pide. Los avionesno son juguetes de niña. Un ángel le hará más ilusión. Esta niña está muy descreída. No quiero que se vuelva una atea como tú. Frida

Bebía porque quería ahogar mis penas, pero las malvadas aprendieron a nadar

art must be the expression of an ideological content determined by the social conditions of the moment in which the artist lives.

He brought back an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism, Mexican agrarianism, and Paris studio revolutions. He also brought back with him a highly sophisticated technique and sensibility, memories of a thousand great works he had seen in the cathedrals, palaces, and galleries of Europe, love for his native land, a determination to build his art on a fusion of his Paris sophistication with the plastic heritage of his people, and to paint for them on public walls.

The education of an artist is one of the most chaotic branches of formal education.

it became ever more of an accident who would “study art” and more of a wonder that creative personality should sometimes escape destruction in the genteel and deadening routine.

The tall tales for which Diego was famous, improvised effortlessly as a spider spins his web, their pattern changing with each retelling, were fables wrapped in fables, woven so skillfully out of truth and fantasy that one thread could not be distinguished from the other, told with such artistry that they compelled the momentary suspension of disbelief.

The world of his dreams was as real as the world around him. This is a trait that must persist into adulthood if one is to be a creative artist: in every artist, no matter how mature and sophisticated, there remains something always of the unaging child, still marveling at the daily discovery of the wonder and beauty of the world, still eager, as children are, to communicate each discovery.

Future historians, discovering the ruins of this single building—the frescoes are painted to endure as long as the walls themselves—would be able from them alone to reconstruct a rich and varied picture of the Mexican land, its people, their labors, festivals, ways of living, struggles, aspirations, dreams. From it, too, they could reconstruct some notion of the thought-currents of the Western world in our time. Not since the Renaissance has any work embodied so vast a cosmology and sociology as this.

Mediocrity does not arouse violent reactions, only indifference.

Tina Modotti and EdwardWeston opened an upscale portrait studio and became involved in the avant-garde community of San Angel, a fashionable southern suburb in Mexico City, which was at one time a weekend retreat for Spanish nobility. It wasn’t until about sixty years ago that this still-quaint district became an integral part of Mexico City. Tina, as usual, modeled and romped in the nude, this time for Diego Rivera, an internationally acclaimed artist. In 1926, Diego’s wife Lupe Marín, accused him of having an affair with Tina and insisted that he not see her again. Not being daunted by his wife’s insistence, Diego frequently hung out with Tina and her younger friend Frida Kahlo, who in turn also enjoyed Diego’s company. It was all just part of the wild times in San Angel, however it probably led to Diego and Lupe’s separation and ultimate divorce.

Se aplican ya técnicas de publicidad moderna a los procesos culturales, derivadas en parte de las halladas intuitivamente por algunos pintores (el muralismo como noticia: el escándalo de la frase “Dios no existe” en el mural de Diego Rivera en el Hotel del Prado que es borrada por un grupo derechista y vuelta a instalar; la Virgen de Guadalupe en la gabardina de Mario Moreno Cantinflas en el mural de Rivera en el Teatro de los Insurgentes, imagen borrada para “no ofender los sentimientos religiosos del pueblo mexicano”).

This is getting depressing,” Julieta said. “Let’s go to the Casa Azul.” The Blue House, in Coyoacán, a short walk from the restaurant, was where Frida Kahlo had been born, grew up, and lived with Diego Rivera.

La época también consiente y exige el culto a la personalidad. Las grandes figuras son los muralistas. Diego Rivera ha peleado con el Partido Comunista, que lo atacó por haber hospedado a Trotsky, y sostiene con Siqueiros controversias públicas, la primera en el Palacio de Bellas Artes.

But there were also men of far greater value who were drawn to Cubism, men whose language was paint or sculpture: among them Léger, Picabia, Delaunay, La Fresnaye, Le Fauconnier, Dufy for a while and Friesz, Lhote, Kisling, Herbin of the Bateau-Lavoir, Survage, Marcoussis, Diego Rivera, Mondrian, Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and perhaps the most important of them all, the three brothers Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp.

Sin la Revolución —observa Octavio Paz— esos artistas no se habrían expresado o sus creaciones habrían adoptado otras formas; asimismo, sin la obra de los muralistas, la Revolución no habría sido lo que fue. El movimiento muralista fue ante todo un descubrimiento del presente y el pasado de México, algo que el sacudimiento revolucionario había puesto a la vista: la verdadera realidad de nuestro país no era lo que veían los liberales y los porfiristas del siglo pasado sino otra, sepultada y no obstante viva… Todos tenemos nostalgia y envidia de un momento maravilloso que no hemos podido vivir. Uno de ellos es ese momento en el que, recién llegado de Europa, Diego Rivera vuelve a ver, como si nunca la hubiese visto antes, la realidad mexicana.

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.

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. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.

Not long after coming to Detroit, I heard of a museum of machinery in Dearborn which had been set up by Henry Ford but which, at that time, had not acquired its present popularity. The well-to-do people of fashionable Grosse Pointe and the Detroit workers as well ignored Greenfield Village, as this museum area was called. Almost nobody had any use for it, and I found out about it only through hearing people laugh at "old man Ford" for "wasting" millions on his "pile of scrap iron." These gibes excited my curiosity, and I asked my friends how I could arrange a visit and what was the earliest time I might go. "Any time you like," they answered, not troubling to conceal their disdain.

The first thing I encountered on entering the museum was the earliest steam engine built in England. As I walked on, marveling at each successive mechanical wonder, I realized that I was witnessing the history of machinery, as if on parade, from its primitive beginnings to the present day, in all its complex and astounding elaborations. Henry Ford's so-called "pile of scrap iron" was organized not only with scientific clarity but with impeccable, unpretentious good taste. Relics of the times associated with each machine were displayed beside it. To me, Greenfield Village, inside and out, was a visual feast.

From seven in the morning until half past one the next morning -- that's quite a record time for a visitor to stay at a museum," [Henry Ford] continued. "It proves that you may be even more interested in mechanics than I am. And you almost have to be a fanatic to compete with me. That's certainly something!" he exclaimed, grinning broad approval of our common bond.

A Universidade era um edifício de estilo espanhol, construído expressamente para aquele fim, havendo a decoração sido confiada a artistas jovens. […] No entanto, o único artista de valor já não era rapaz e fizera longo aprendizado na Europa. Kate vira reproduções dalguns frescos de Ribera. [Diogo Rivera] Agora apreciava os originais nos claustros da Universidade. Eram interessantes: o homem sabia do ofício. Mas a inspiração provinha do ódio latente no artista. Em muitas pinturas de índios notava-se a sua simpatia por estes, mas sempre num aspecto idealista e social. Nunca o impulso espontâneo que vem do sangue. Esses índios constituíam o símbolo do socialismo moderno, figuras patéticas das vítimas da indústria actual e do capitalismo. Eis o que representavam: símbolos da cansada literatura socialista e anarquista.

Nos anos 50, Diego Rivera [seu marido], já a considerava «como a primeira mulher na história da arte a tratar, com absoluta e descomprometida honestidade, podíamos até dizer com uma crueldade indiferente, aqueles temas gerais e específicos que apenas dizem respeito às mulheres.

Como artista excepcional, político militante e contemporâneo excêntrico, Diego Rivera teve um papel primordial numa época muito importante no México. Tornou-se, embora polémico, o mais citado artista do continente hispano-americano no estrangeiro. Foi pintor, desenhador, artista gráfico, escultor, arquitecto, cenógrafo e um dos primeiros coleccionadores de arte mexicana pré-colonial. O seu nome está relacionado com os de Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Leo Trotski, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti e, como não podia deixar de ser, Frida Kahlo. Foi, simultaneamente, alvo de ódio e amor, admiração e rejeição, lendas e difamação. O mito que, ainda em vida, se criou à volta da sua pessoa, não se deve somente à sua obra, mas também ao seu papel activo na vida política da sua época, às suas amizades e aos seus conflitos com personalidades famosas, à sua aparência fascinante e ao seu carácter rebelde. Nas suas recordações, difundidas em diversas obras biográficas, Rivera contribuiu bastante para a criação do mito à volta da sua pessoa. Gostava de se apresentar como menino precoce de ascendência exótica, que combatera na Revolução mexicana como jovem rebelde, um visionário que se recusava a fazer parte da vanguarda europeia, e que estava predestinado para ser o cabecilha da revolução artística. A sua biógrafa, Gladys March, confirma, no entanto, que a sua vida real era muito mais banal e que Rivera tinha grandes dificuldades em separar a ficção da realidade.

The girl woke up.” I reach for the bottle of juice. Doc said she needs to take in some sugar. “What did she say?” “Her name is Angelina. Didn’t offer last name. She was traveling when Diego’s men bagged her and put her on that truck. Says she’s from Atlanta and has family there.” “Sounds like something Rivera would do.” “Yeah.” I nod and reach for the glass. “Except it’s all bullshit.” “You think she’s lying?” “About everything except her name.” “Why would she lie?” “Because her name is Angelina Sofia Sandoval,” I say. “She’s Manny Sandoval’s daughter, Roman.” “You’re shitting me.