RTF Review: Ballet’s Secret Code

By Nicholas Jones Ballet’s secret code is a documentary about the Origins and principles behind Maestro Enrico Cecchetti’s lifetime of work and devotion to the Classical humanist art form: Ballet. Madam Julie Cronshaw takes us through the depths of his character, education and philosophy and his work as a Ballet Master under Diaghilev for the…

Francisco de Goya: Master Critic of the Human Condition

By Adam Sedia Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) is one of Spain’s best known painters. Heir to the tradition of El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, and Zurbarán, textbooks consider him the last of the Old Masters and simultaneously first of the moderns. But Goya’s importance derives from a deeply individual approach to his subject matter,…

Norman Rockwell & the Rediscovery of America’s Moral Compass

By Matthew Ehret A great poet once said that you can judge a nation by how it honors (or fails to honor) its artists. In many ways, the soul of a nation is entirely shaped by the artists which that society has produced. This makes perfectly good sense, as an artist is able to portray…

Kirk Douglas, Trumbo and JFK: When Hollywood Patriots Resisted the Deep State

By Matthew Ehret In recent decades, barring a few exceptions, Hollywood (just like much of the mainstream media) has become a branch of the CIA and broader military industrial complex. While fake news agencies as CNN spin false facts to the intellects of mushy-minded Americans, Hollywood prepares the fertile soil for those false seeds to…

How Classical Painting Liberates us from the Shackles of the Senses

An exploration of Schiller’s Aesthetics as it pertains to political revolutions past and future By Matthew Ehret This article is based on a RTF lecture given on Feb. 11, 2019 in Montreal Canada. German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) wrote his twenty six Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man in 1794 in order to address…

Cultural Warfare and the American Revolution (Franklin, West and Morse Revisited)

In this lecture delivered as part of the Rising Tide Foundation series “Towards an Age of Creative Reason”, Matthew Ehret introduces the fight to establish a cultural revolution in the arts and sciences initiated by Benjamin Franklin, and a small international network of co-conspirators of the 18th century which was then understood to be the vital…

Sparks of a New Renaissance in Painting Emerge from China

By Matthew Ehret It is rare to see new artistic movements arise. It is even rarer that such artistic revolutions manage to respect the best traditions of the past while at the same time infuse something new and improved into society. The fatal error made by many innovators attempting to break with the often stultifying…