Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957)

Excerpts from his autobiography as recorded by Gladys March between 1944 and 1957 (source)

"I know now that he who hopes to be universal in his art must plant in his own soil. Great art is like a tree which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit, and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the entire world, because taste is rooted in nature. When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters -- Michelangelo, Cezanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican."

The Flower Carrier, Oil and tempera on masonite,
1935, SF MOMA
Image courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive

"In 1913 I had reached the cubist phase of my development. I worked hard at my cubist paintings all through that year and the first half of 1914, because everything about the movement fascinated and intrigued me.
It was a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that had previously been said and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the old world would soon blow itself apart, never to be the same again, so cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns and -- ultimately -- new worlds. When it dawned on me that all this innovation had little to do with real life, I would surrender all the glory and acclaim cubism had brought me for a way in art truer to my innermost feelings."

(editor's note: the below was written upon returning to Mexico in 1921]

"My homecoming produced an esthetic exhilaration which it is impossible to describe. It was as if I were being born anew, born into a new world. All the colors I saw appeared to be heightened; they were clearer, richer, finer, and more full of light. The dark tones had a depth they had never had in Europe. I was in the very center of the plastic world, where forms and colors existed in absolute purity. In everything I saw a potential masterpiece -- the crowds, the markets, the festivals, the marching battalions, the workingmen in the shops and fields -- in every glowing face I had the conviction that if I lived a hundred lives I could not exhaust even a fraction of this store of buoyant beauty."