Diego Rivera > Quotes

“I've never believed in God. But I believe in Picasso.”
― Diego Rivera

“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.”
― Diego Rivera

“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, My Art, My Life

“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

“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, My Art, My Life

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“you have to trust a TRUE compliment as muc as a critique.”
― 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, My Art, My Life

“Toma de la vida todo lo que te dé, sea lo que sea, siempre que te interese y te pueda dar cierto placer.”
― Diego Rivera

“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

“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, My Art, My Life

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

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

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, Diego et Frida

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“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, My Art, My Life

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“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.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life