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Diego Rivera Quotes

Total quotes: 8
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Artist, Art, Artisitic Vision, Life, Painting, Vision
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Ethics, Life, Materialism, Power, Success, Temptation, Wealth
“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
Tagged: Marx, Theory, Lenin, Organization
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Animals, Childhood, Friendship, Trust
“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
Tagged: Artist, Art, humanity, Feelings
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Labor, Machinery, Consumer
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Architecture, Art, Murals, harmony
“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: An Autobiography
Tagged: Art, Detroit, Philosophy, Industry
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