The spiritual odyssey of Nicholas Roerich: Art beyond boundaries

The text below is the excerpt of the book Nicholas Roerich (ISBN: 9781646999651), written by Kenneth Archer, published by Parkstone International.

Nicholas Roerich, also spelled Nikolai Roerich, was a Russian artist, writer, archaeologist, philosopher, and visionary who lived from 1874 to 1947. He is renowned for his prolific artistic output, which includes paintings, set designs, and costumes, as well as his exploration of spiritual and mystical themes. Roerich’s paintings often depict landscapes, mystical scenes, and symbolic imagery, imbued with deep spiritual significance. He was also an advocate for cultural preservation and peace, establishing the Roerich Pact, an international treaty aimed at protecting cultural heritage during times of conflict. Roerich’s legacy extends beyond his art, as he remains influential in the realms of spirituality, philosophy, and cultural diplomacy.

‘The idea of east and west – the idea of the twain which shall never meet – is to our mind already a fossilized idea. We are already ashamed to believe that superficial walls can exist and can divide the best impulses of humanity, this impulse of creative evolution. And now before our eyes is the socalled west and the so-called east. Piercingly they look at each other. They can be the closest friends and co-workers.’ – Nicholas Roerich, New York, 1929

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) began his life in imperial Russia, on the eastern edge of western civilisation. He ended his days in the British Himalayas at an outpost of western society in the east. As a burgeoning artist and scholar, he had grown up among the intelligentsia of St Petersburg, known since its founding as Russia’s ‘window on the west.’ Like generations of European painters, he furthered his artistic training in France and Italy. But he was always intrigued by the oriental aspects of Russia. In the World of Art circle of Sergei Diaghilev, Roerich as a young professional was identified with the Slavophile rather than the Francophile faction. Designing for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Roerich saw Europe in the last years of the Belle Epoque, and the international exhibition of his paintings was part of the creative outburst so abruptly interrupted by World War I.

Around the time of the Russian Revolution, Roerich left his homeland- virtually for life. From 1917 until 1919 he lived in Finland and exhibited his paintings in Scandinavia. He then moved to London where he designed at Covent Garden and presented his Spells of Russia exhibition, which toured to other English cities. In 1920 he took his wife and sons to the United States, becoming one of the many European artists displaced in the twentieth century by wars and revolutions. But Roerich arrived in America with considerable advantages. He had come through the prestigious invitation of the Chicago Art Institute and commissions from the Chicago Opera. New York, however, became his base, and for several years he flourished not only as a painter but as a founder of various cultural institutions. At the age of forty-nine he was a successful man and a model of the western artist as the role had evolved since the Renaissance. By the time he was fifty, however, his life had undergone a total reorientation. In 1923 he sailed with his family to India and toured the subcontinent before embarking on a five-year expedition through Central Asia.

Roerich’s art manifested the same polarity as his life. What first inspired his painting was the history hidden in the Russian earth, findings from his own archaeological excavations. The bones, urns, knives and other ritual objects of burial sites led the artist, even as an adolescent, to study the customs of the ancient Slavs.

From this source came the master works of his early career, scenes of archaic life reimagined through myth. His fascination with subterranean clues to human development evolved over time into pure contemplation of the Himalayan peaks. There his quest culminated. In spectacular panoramas on the roof of the world he found the painterly image that linked outer reality and inner revelation. Mountains became for him the means to explore pure colour, the synthesis of visual perception and spiritual awareness. From his debut as a turn of the century Symbolist rendering archetypal visions of Russia, he eventually found his own method of abstraction- liberating the mountainscape from detail and reifying it as a medium for meditation.

Between these points of origin and destination, Roerich was always a landscape painter, who located people within the culture they helped to build, whether that entailed ceremonial systems or architectural structures. In the course of his life the artist worked his way through figuration, shifting focus from groups to solitary human figures, which get smaller and smaller in a vast setting. Finally the figure disappears. This evolution in his art, according to Frances Grant, a New York journalist in the 1920’s and an executive of his American institutions, was a process of which he was acutely aware. The change was ‘not so much in subject,’ she said:

His interest was in man as part of the whole cosmic process. And so you begin with man. As far as Russia [is concerned], it began [for him] with the Stone Age- he sees the whole adventure. He once said it was wonderful to hold the end of a thread in Russia and find its beginning in Central Asia… He saw this thread of mankind; always the thread; always unbroken.

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