I leave you the best phrases of Diego Rivera, renowned Mexican painter and muralist, ex-husband of the renowned Frida Kahlo, and remembered largely for his multiple murals with social themes in various buildings in the historic center of Mexico City.
His works include El Cargador de Flores, The Man Controller of the Universe, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, Zapata Líder Agrario, Unidad Panamericana, among others.
Portrait of Diego Rivera belonging to the Diego Rivera Mural Museum of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) in Mexico City.
You may also be interested in these phrases by Frida Kahlo.
-Every painter is land that receives land from another painter.
-I'm not pessimistic, I'm rather hedonistic and epicurean.
-Take from life everything it gives you, whatever it is, as long as it interests you and can give you some pleasure.
-I have come to paint with the same naturalness with which I spoke, breathed and sweated.
-The supreme happiness of living is love in all its forms.
-I have never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.
-My style was born as a child, in an instant, with the difference that that birth was preceded by a 35-year pregnancy.
-I don't have faith, faith is the heritage of idiots.
-If they gave me the possibility of being born again, I assure you that I will not return to Earth even as a joke.
-I believe that the commandment "love one another" does not indicate a numerical limitation of any species but rather, it encompasses the entire humanity.
-It is only believed when it is not understood.
-I gave Frida Kahlo such a bad life that the best thing would be not to have been born.
-True art criticism is one that is based on impartial criteria and aesthetic sensitivity.
-Introspection has been a complete failure for me.
-The aesthetic emotion is as useful to man as the digestive functions.
-A man is to the woman what the horse is to the man. And little more needs to be said.
-I feel the greatest indulgence for the greatest, macabre and bizarre defects.
-The height of unhappiness oscillates between constipation and reluctantly attending a worldly gathering.
-For me, the height of happiness would be not having been born.
-Something may be undesirable because we don't quite understand it and, of course, the easiest option is to hate it.
-Looking back at my work, I think the best came from the things I felt most deeply, while the worst came from pride in my talent itself.
-I didn't know it at the time, but when Frida took me by the hand to her room and made all her paintings parade before me, she had already become the most important thing in my life.
-He who wishes to be universal in his art must plant in his own land. Great art is like a tree that grows in a particular place and has its own trunk, its own leaves, branches, and roots.
-You must know, my child, that in my accumulator of love there is enough energy, without ceasing to seem to me that it was only five minutes ago that I found you and began to love you.
-I have always invented loves that I did not have, of which I do not complain, because this has helped me so that people do not realize the ones I actually had.
-Frida is sour and tender, hard like steel and delicate and fine like a butterfly's wing. Adorable as a beautiful and deep smile and cruel as the bitterness of life.
-We men are a subspecies of animals, almost stupid, without meaning or senses, completely inadequate for love, created by women to serve the intelligent and sensitive species that they represent.
-I respect all religions. They interest me extraordinarily on the same plane and for similar reasons with which I respect all diseases and am extraordinarily interested in their cure.
-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 have wanted me to paint not what I see, but what they would like me to see.
-The more native art is, the more it belongs to the whole world, because when art is true it is natural. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.
-And then I realized that someone who climbs the mountain of worldly success, can slip and fall into the river below without being aware of the descent until they were drowning.
-If in art all that is worth and counts is made of a harmonious set of instinct and knowledge, of a compact fabric of intuition and science, few would better correspond to these conditions than the so-called Mexican popular painting.
-The women I have loved? I was lucky to love the most wonderful woman I have ever met. She was poetry itself and genius itself. Unfortunately I did not know how to love her alone, because I have always been unable to love a single woman.
-When the forces of the universe are understood, if one day it is achieved, there will be no reason to invent gods that give us what we are not capable of obtaining by our own forces.
-The first sketch I made left me amazed. It was really good! Since then he has worked confidently and satisfied. The inner doubt, the conflict that tormented me so much in Europe, had disappeared.
-Angelina gave me everything a woman can give a man. Instead, she received from me all the heartache and misery that a man can cause a woman.
-My return home gave me an aesthetic joy impossible to describe. It was as if he had been reborn.