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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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POSADA ABOUT THIS TIME, I met and came under the influence of the great folk artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, the most important of my teachers. Posada was not connected with any academy nor was his work to be found in any fashionable home. He was an engraver with a shop in the Calle de Moneda. A small, fat man, he etched illustrations for the songs, jokes, and tales which wandering minstrels brought to the folk of Mexico. In his lifetime, he did more than 15,000 of these etchings, all printed on sheets of colored tissue paper and sold from door to door. Posada had no place in the official circles of Mexican art, and he was unconcerned about immortality, though he has achieved it where more respected artists of his time have failed and are now forgotten. He knew as much about form and movement as any man I have ever met. It was he who revealed to me the inherent beauty in the Mexican people, their struggle and aspirations. And it was he who taught me the supreme lesson of all art -- that nothing can be expressed except through the force of feeling, that the soul of every masterpiece is powerful emotion. Of course the import of this teaching was lost upon me then, and for many years afterwards. Finding myself in art was to be a long and painful process. 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.
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