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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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ART STUDENT IN PARIS THE PARIS AIR was foggy, the sun barely visible. Some Spanish friends met Valle Inclan and me at the railway station and took us to the Hotel Suez on the Boulevard St. Michel, which catered mainly to Spanish and American art students. I was assigned the very same room in which that remarkable artist Julio Ruelas, precursor of surrealism, had recently died. It was small but it had a big window overlooking the boulevard. Paris had been my goal. My roving now ended, I set to work and soon fell into the usual routine of the art student, studying the museum collections, attending exhibitions and lectures, and working in the free academies of Montparnasse. I also did open-air work along the Seine River. At night I joined groups of fellow students in the cafes in warm discussions of art and politics. Among these students were several Russians who had suffered exile and lived among professional revolutionaries. Their life was one of black misery, sustained only by reports of riots in Russia and their own Utopian dreams. In my painting, I sought a way to incorporate my increasing knowledge and deepening emotions concerning social problems. Two great French revolutionary artists, Daumier and Courbet, lit my path as with great torches. In their work they had achieved a synthesis very much like that which one day would liberate me. Yet, though aware of their examples, I was slow and timid in translating my inner feelings on canvas. I worked at my paintings in an indifferent, even listless way, lacking the confidence to express myself directly. My work of the period from 1909 through the first half of 1910, though it shows certain superiorities to my Spanish canvases, still looks academic and empty. Today it seems like a collection of masks and disguises to me. I have often tried to find an explanation for the incongruity between my understanding of life and my way of responding to it in this period of my painting. Probably the natural timidity of youth was a factor. But more potent, though I was little aware of it then, was my Mexican-American inferiority complex, my awe before historic Europe and its culture. 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.
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