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Artwork · 1944 · Nude painting

Nude with Calla Lilies

Diego Rivera
1944 · Oil on Panel
Location unknown
★ 6.6 editorial score

A nude woman kneels behind an enormous bundle of white calla lilies that nearly engulfs her, the great waxy blooms massed into a sculptural wall of petals. Diego Rivera returned again and again to the calla lily and the flower vendor as emblems of Mexico, and here he fuses the female nude with that beloved motif. Now in a private collection, Nude with Calla Lilies shows his gift for monumental simplicity - the rounded body and the heaped flowers built from bold, smooth forms, sensuality and the abundance of the land folded into a single image.

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Quote · 1893

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Arthur Conan Doyle