0
Skip to Content
Tetragrammaton
WATCH
LOOK
Art
Photos
Booklist
LISTEN
Radio
Podcasts
Playlists
READ
Articles
Poetry
Quotes
Way of Code
JOIN
Tetragrammaton
WATCH
LOOK
Art
Photos
Booklist
LISTEN
Radio
Podcasts
Playlists
READ
Articles
Poetry
Quotes
Way of Code
JOIN
WATCH
Folder: LOOK
Back
Art
Photos
Booklist
Folder: LISTEN
Back
Radio
Podcasts
Playlists
Folder: READ
Back
Articles
Poetry
Quotes
Way of Code
JOIN
Featured
Study for “Swing Landscape”
Study for “Swing Landscape”

STUART DAVIS

In Jazz music, a basic chord structure is improvised on by musicians, creating new and unlikely combinations and songs from a base starting point. Stuart Davis’ paintings can be understood in the same way; he worked within a theme, painting series of similar images where he would alter the color, the geometric composition and scale but retain the base formal components. Employed by the Works Progress Administration, that gave artists jobs painting murals during the Great Depression, he was fiercely patriotic, depicting America in joyous reverie. His works are jazz ballads, loose and unstructured by rich in emotion in movement. This is a fragment of a preparatory work of his masterpiece, “Swing Landscape”. It depicts workers at a dock, abstracted and frenetic. There is an inherent optimism to Davis’ paintings of contemporary life, he renders labour and leisure in the same vivid style, uplifting the everyday occasion into musicality.

Flower Day
Flower Day

DIEGO RIVERA

What appears at first as a quaint depiction of Mexican street life hides radical and political ideas behind it’s metropolitan idealism. Rivera casts a long shadow across the history of 20th Century Art, synthesising Pan-American influences, Renaissance frescoes, cubist philosophies, Aztec culture and socialist realism into an aesthetically powerfully and socially engaged oeuvre. Flower sellers were a subject he would return to repeatedly across his career, visiting them in murals, frescoes and paintings, but this is his first ever depiction of the theme that would stay with him for decades. The piece praises labour, it can be read as a celebration of work with the flower seller as it’s hero. It is notably, too, that she sells goods with a purely aesthetic value, and remains dignified in doing so – Rivera saw himself and all artists in the quiet power of the flower selling, ensuring that the work of creation visual beauty was seen as dignified.

The Kiss
The Kiss

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Two lovers are dissolved into a pure, single, abstract form in the first sculpture of modernism. Brancusi’s choice of a kiss to make this radical, revolutionary action was no mistake. In a fell swoop he was situating himself in pantheon of art history and making all the painted and sculpture depictions of romance that came before him seem old fashioned. Throughout the rest of his life he would come back again and again to this sculpture, creating new versions that were simpler, more formalistic than the ones before. Yet here is the first, a proto-cubist rendering that reduces the most natural of acts into art that approaches geometry. Inspired by African, Assyrian and Egyptian art, ‘The Kiss’ created a new language of Western Sculpture by subverting one of its most sustained motifs.


Featured

Thursday 29th May
Today marks Ascension, the moment in the Christian calendar when Christ is said to have ascended into the heavens, forty days after Easter. It is a day that carries a sense of upliftment, transcendence, and lightness of being. This spiritual gesture is mirrored in the heavens, as the moon rises in the constellation of Gemini—a sign of air, brightness, and communication. Gemini draws us into connection, curiosity, and movement, helping to lift our thinking and bring light to our conversations and inner life. On this day of spiritual ascent and celestial airiness, may we find clarity, openness, and a renewed sense of direction, both in the garden and in ourselves.

<style>

  audio::-webkit-media-controls-timeline {display: yes;}

  audio::-webkit-media-controls-current-time-display{display: yes;}

</style>

<audio id='a2' style="height: 5vh; width:100%;" controls="" name="media"><source src="https://clyp.it/amnjse4q.mp3?token=2325a29c525e1d912fff8207ad02f22f" type="audio/mpeg"></audio>

Featured
The Bells
Featured
Screenshot 2025-05-29 at 00.44.12.png
The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes May 29, 2025

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling". Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero? Is it the man Balzac? Is it the author Balzac?

Read More →
Film

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1088859719?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Abstraction"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

More Like This on TG3

Read More →
Benedikt Taschen
Benedikt Taschen

1h 43m

5.28.25

In this clip, Rick speaks with Benedikt Taschen about childhood dreams.

<iframe width="100%" height="265" src="https://clyp.it/3aif1ohk/widget?token=cdf147700a9538efc6397b9bd06967e6" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Read More →
Film

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1088284197?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Acting Shakespeare - The Two Traditions clip 2"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

More Like This on TG2

Read More →

close da box

Your thoughts about

Thank you!

Sign up for transmissions

Thank you!

READ
Articles
Poetry
Quotes

WATCH
Networks

LOOK
Art
Photos
Booklist

LISTEN
Radio
Podcasts
Playlists