Nicholas Roerich

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Roerich left behind more than 7,000 paintings, a spiritual movement that still has followers today, and an international treaty signed at the White House in April 1935. Born on the 9th of October 1874 in Saint Petersburg, he died on the 13th of December 1947 in Naggar, India, having spent the decades in between as a painter, archaeologist, writer, philosopher, set designer, expedition leader, and peace activist. Few lives in the modern era crossed so many disciplines or so many borders. Who was the man behind the Himalayan canvases and the Banner of Peace movement? What drove him from the salons of imperial Russia to a tent in sub-zero Tibet? And what exactly was he trying to build in the mountains of Central Asia?

• 2. Saint Petersburg Beginnings

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  At the Imperial Academy of Arts, which Roerich entered in 1893 simultaneously with St. Petersburg University, he studied painting and earned the title of "artist" in 1897. A law degree followed the next year. That double education stayed with him: he was always equally comfortable arguing a cause and painting one. His father was Baltic German, his mother Russian, and the household in St. Petersburg gave him access to artists, intellectuals, and scientists from an early age. He showed an aptitude for drawing and botany before he ever held a formal brush.

  From the apocryphal Dove Book and medieval sectarian writings, Roerich absorbed an atmosphere of mystery that shaped his canvases. Alongside Mikhail Vrubel and Mikhail Nesterov, he came to be regarded as one of the major representatives of Russian Symbolism in art. That movement promoted mysticism, free expression, and a belief in the transformative power of art. Roerich extended those ideas for the rest of his life.

  His 1904-1905 publication "Architectural Studies," built from dozens of paintings of Russian fortresses, monasteries, and churches made during two long trips through the country, marked his first public campaign for preservation of artistic heritage. Some of his religious commissions pushed well beyond accepted norms. The designs he submitted for the Talashkino church, patronized by Maria Tenisheva, were considered so radical that the Orthodox church refused to consecrate the building. The stained glass windows he created for the Datsan Gunzechoinei between 1913 and 1915 show the same range: a painter whose subject was Russia but whose imagination ranged far beyond it.

• 3. Diaghilev and The Rite of Spring

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  Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes was the most talked-about artistic enterprise in Europe in the early twentieth century, and Roerich was at the center of it. He became a member of Diaghilev's "World of Art" society and served as its president from 1910 to 1916, despite early tensions with the group. His set and costume designs were among the most celebrated the company produced.

  For Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor, first staged in 1909, Roerich created designs that audiences and critics recognized as something new in Russian stage art. His costumes and sets for The Rite of Spring in 1913 became his most famous theatrical work. The ballet, with music by Igor Stravinsky, premiered in a season that changed what audiences expected from a music-theater experience. Roerich was also an accomplished scenic designer for other theatrical producers. In London he contributed designs for a cooperative group of Russian theatrical artists, LAHDA, led by Theodore Komisarjevsky, and he worked for Thomas Beecham's Covent Garden Theatre, though that engagement ended without full payment. A commission to design a 1922 production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden for the soprano Mary Garden of the Chicago Opera showed that his reputation had crossed the Atlantic by then.

• 4. Revolution, Exile, and the Great Plan

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  When the February Revolution of 1917 toppled the czar, Roerich joined the so-called "Gorky Commission," working alongside Maxim Gorky and Aleksandr Benois to press the Provisional Government on cultural policy and on protecting art from vandalism. He was a political moderate who cared more for Russia's cultural heritage than for any party. After the October Revolution brought Lenin's Bolsheviks to power, illness forced him out of Petrograd and into Karelia, near the Finnish border, where he gave up both the presidency of the World of Art society and the directorship of the School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts.

  In early 1918, Roerich, his wife Helena, and their two sons George and Svetoslav crossed into Finland and did not return. He published a pamphlet titled "Violators of Art" in 1918-1919 and illustrated Leonid Andreyev's anticommunist text "S.O.S." His own stated belief was that the triumph of Russian culture would come through a new appreciation of ancient myth and legend, not through revolution.

  By the time the family arrived in London in mid-1919, however, his politics had shifted. He and Helena founded their own system of mysticism, Agni Yoga, described as "the system of living ethics," in London in March 1920. Roerich believed that spiritual masters called Mahatmas, living in the Himalayas, communicated through Helena, who was a clairvoyant. These beings, he said, had revealed in 1922 that he was an incarnation of the Fifth Dalai Lama. From these beliefs grew his "Great Plan": the unification of millions of Asian peoples through a religious movement centered on the Future Buddha, Maitreya, in a polity stretching from Altai and Tuva through Mongolia and Tibet, with its capital called "Zvenigorod," the City of Tolling Bells, at the foot of Mount Belukha.

• 5. The Asian Expedition

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  In 1923, Roerich set out for the Himalayas with Helena and their son Yuri. He first settled in Darjeeling in the same house the 13th Dalai Lama had occupied during his Indian exile. British intelligence noted that lamas from the Moru monastery believed Roerich to be the incarnation of the Fifth Dalai Lama, on account of a mole pattern on his right cheek.

  The formal Asian Expedition began in 1925, with Roerich, Helena, their son George, and six others traveling a route Roerich later described in his own words as passing "from Sikkim through Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, the Karakoram Mountains, Khotan, Kashgar, Qara Shar, Urumchi, Irtysh, the Altai Mountains, the Oyrot region of Mongolia, the Central Gobi, Kansu, Tsaidam, and Tibet," including a detour through Siberia to Moscow in 1926. The intelligence services of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan all monitored the party. Roerich had contacted the Soviet government and its secret police before departing, offering to report on British activities in the region. The Soviet chief of foreign intelligence, Mikhail Trilisser, responded with only lukewarm interest.

  Between the summer of 1927 and June 1928, the outside world believed the expedition had been lost. It had not been lost: it had been stopped. Roerich wrote that in Tibet they were detained by local authorities for five months despite holding Tibetan passports. They lived in tents in sub-zero temperatures and survived on meagre rations. Five members of the expedition died during that detention. When authorities finally allowed them to leave in March 1928, they trekked south into India and established the Himalayan Research Institute there. The University of Paris nominated Roerich for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929; he received further nominations in 1932 and 1935.

• 6. The Roerich Pact

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  Roerich's concept of "Peace through Culture" took formal shape in the Pax Cultura, which he described as the equivalent of a Red Cross for art and culture. The idea was simple: just as hospitals and medical workers carried a neutral emblem in wartime, cultural monuments and the people who tended them should carry a recognized sign of protection. He called the emblem the Banner of Peace.

  On the 15th of April 1935, the United States and the other twenty nations of the Pan-American Union signed the Roerich Pact at the White House. The pact was an early international instrument for the protection of cultural property, comparable in ambition to later UNESCO conventions. That outcome was reached partly because Henry A. Wallace, then heading the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was an admirer of Roerich. Wallace had also sponsored the Manchurian Expedition of 1934-1935, in which Roerich, Helena, and scientists H. G. MacMillan and James F. Stephens collected seeds of drought-resistant plants across Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. The expedition found almost 300 species of xerophytes and recovered antique manuscripts described as scientifically important. Reports later reached Wallace, though, that the party had used American-supplied weapons to threaten local populations and had promised American backing for an uprising, charges that damaged the relationship.

• 7. India, the War Years, and Death

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  In 1942, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi visited Roerich at his house in Kullu. Their conversation ranged across Indian-Russian cultural cooperation, and Nehru spoke of "useful and creative co-operation" as a goal. Indira Gandhi later recalled Roerich as "a man with extensive knowledge and enormous experience, a man with a big heart, deeply influenced by all that he observed."

  During the war years in India, Roerich painted Russian heroic themes: Alexander Nevsky, The Fight of Mstislav and Rededia, Boris and Gleb. He kept up a lengthy correspondence with Henry Wallace, who ran for the U.S. presidency as the Progressive Party candidate in 1948. In New York in 1942 the American-Russian Cultural Association, ARCA, was formed, drawing in Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Rockwell Kent, and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, with endorsement from scientists Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton.

  Roerich died in Kullu on the 13th of December 1947. His wife Helena described the day of his cremation: "Not a single breath of wind and all surrounding mountains were clad in fresh snowy attire."

• 8. Legacy and Reach

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  The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City remains the primary institution for his artistic work in the twenty-first century. His paintings hang in collections across the world: the State Museum of Oriental Arts in Moscow, the Russian State Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Tretyakov Gallery, the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia, the National Museum of Serbia, the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, and the Latvian National Museum of Art, among others. In June 2013, at Russian Art Week in London, his Madonna Laboris sold at Bonhams for £7,881,250, including the buyer's premium, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at a Russian art auction.

  H. P. Lovecraft referenced Roerich's paintings of Asian mountain landscapes in At the Mountains of Madness, describing them as "strange and disturbing." The minor planet 4426 Roerich and a crater near the south pole of Mercury both carry his name. A memorial plaque marks the house in the Lahaul valley where Roerich spent summers from 1929 to 1932. The movement built around his spiritual and philosophical ideas, known as Roerichism, continues to attract followers. His son Svetoslav eventually married Devika Rani, the grand-niece of Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and Nobel laureate whom Roerich had befriended in England decades before.