Bertram D. Wolfe > Quotes

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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. . . ”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“The education of an artist is one of the most chaotic branches of formal education.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“Mediocrity does not arouse violent reactions, only indifference.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera