Nicholas Goddamn Roerich

When Witold was in town the other day, he told me he wanted to see this museum in my neighborhood–the Nicholas Roerich Museum. Not only had I never heard of the museum, I’d never heard of the artist.

Roerich had an amazing life, really the kind of thing you’d associate with a fictional character, if some Michael Chabon or E. L. Doctorow type of writer were to construct a novel intended to bring to life the interactions between Europe, Asia, and American during the first half of the twentieth century.

Here’s the story:

Nicholas Roerich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 9, 1874, the first-born son of lawyer and notary, Konstantin Roerich and his wife Maria. . . . When he was nine, a noted archeologist came to conduct explorations in the region and took young Roerich on his excavations of the local tumuli. The adventure of unveiling the mysteries of forgotten eras with his own hands sparked an interest in archeology that would last his lifetime. . . . While still quite young, Roerich showed a particular aptitude for drawing, and by the time he reached the age of sixteen he began to think about entering the Academy of Art . . . His father did not consider painting to be a fit vocation for a responsible member of society, however, and insisted that his son follow his own steps in the study of law. . . . In 1895 Roerich met the prominent writer, critic, and historian, Vladimir Stasov. Through him he was introduced to many of the composers and artists of the time–Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, and the basso Fyodor Chaliapin.

Adding the obscure singer is the perfect touch here. Three of the greatest composers of all time and some guy you’ve never heard of.

The bio continues:

He frequently related music to the use of color and color harmonies, and applied this sense to his designs for opera. As Nina Selivanova wrote in her book, The World of Roerich: “The original force of Roerich’s work consists in a masterly and marked symmetry and a definite rhythm, like the melody of an epic song.”

“The World of Roerich,” indeed. Do you wonder how it came to be that people wrote books about this person? Wonder no more:

After finishing his university thesis, Roerich planned to set off for a year in Europe to visit the museums, exhibitions, studios, and salons of Paris and Berlin. Just before leaving he met Helena, daughter of the architect Shaposhnikov and niece of the composer Mussorgsky. . . . Helena Roerich was an unusually gifted woman, a talented pianist, and author of many books, including The Foundations of Buddhism and a Russian translation of Helena Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. . . . Later, in New York, Nicholas and Helena Roerich founded the Agni Yoga Society, which espoused a living ethic encompassing and synthesizing the philosophies and religious teachings of all ages.

OK, we’re not there yet:

Prompted by the need to provide some income for his new household, Roerich applied for and won the position of Secretary of the School of the Society for the Encouragement of Art . . . Roerich determined to overhaul the Society and rescue it from the academic mediocrity it had foundered in for many years. He instituted a system of training in art that seems revolutionary even by today’s standards: to teach all the arts—painting, music, singing, dance, theater, and the so-called “industrial arts”, such as ceramics, painting on porcelain, pottery, and mechanical drawing—under one roof, and to give his faculty free rein to design their own curriculum.

Sounds very early twentieth-century, no? John Dewey and all that.

The biography continues:

As Garabed Paelian affirms in his book Nicholas Roerich: Roerich “…learned things ignored by other men; perceived relations between seemingly isolated phenomena, and unconsciously felt the presence of an unknown treasure.”

Yes, he was the subject of more than one book! But first, more of the life:

In 1902, the Roerichs celebrated the birth of their first son, George, and in the summers of 1903 and 1904, they set off on an extended tour of forty cities throughout Russia. Roerich’s purpose was to contrast the styles and historical context of Russian architecture. . . . on his return in 1904, Roerich promulgated the plan that he hoped would create protection everywhere for such cultural treasures, a plan consummated thirty-one years later in the Roerich Pact.

He had his own Pact! Like Molotov, Ribbentrop, and Warsaw. Here’s more:

Roerich’s efforts to promulgate such a treaty resulted, finally, on April 15, 1935, in the signing by the nations of the Americas–members of the Pan American Union–of The Roerich Pact, in the White House in Washington. This is a treaty still in force.

And here’s president Roosevelt signing it, no kidding:

But, back to the life:

In 1904 Roerich painted the first of his paintings on religious themes. These mostly dealt with Russian saints and legends, and included Message to Tiron, Fiery Furnace, and The Last Angel, subjects that he returned to with numerous variants in later years.

You could imagine Michael Chabon writing that, no? But life goes on:

Meanwhile Roerich’s search for archeological treasures continued. . . . Roerich wrote about the unusual similarity of Stone Age techniques and methods of ornamentation in far-separated regions of the globe. . . . In 1906, in the first of many entrepreneurial efforts that were to bring Russian art and music to the attention of Europeans, Sergei Diaghilev arranged an exhibition of Russian paintings in Paris. These included sixteen works by Nicholas Roerich.

So he was a legit artist. And, yes, his paintings hanging on the wall in that museum are excellent. I do recommend you stop by there when you’re in the neighborhood.

Nicholas Roerich was the prime mover and, with Igor Stravinsky, the co-creator of the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, or, The Rite of Spring. At first entitled The Great Sacrifice: a Tableau of Pagan Russia, the motif for the ballet grew out of Roerich’s absorption with antiquity and, as he wrote in a letter to Diaghilev, “the beautiful cosmogony of earth and sky.” In the ballet Roerich sought to express the primitive rites of ancient man as he welcomed spring, the life-giver, and made sacrifice to Yarilo, the Sun God.

Wait a minute. Roerich was the co-creator of The Rite of Spring? Really? And I’d never heard of this guy. I’m typing here at my computer, will take a moment to fire up The Rite of Spring and play it in the background to get in the right frame of mind. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written! Admittedly, I get nothing out of the dancing. But I guess the ballet framework was necessary for the music to have been written, the stone (from my perspective) from which the soup was built.

And Roerich was a cool guy:

Interpreting what could have been described as negative, barbaric behavior, Roerich later wrote: “I remember how during the first performance the audience whistled and roared so that nothing could even be heard. Who knows, perhaps at that very moment they were inwardly exultant and expressing this feeling like the most primitive of peoples. But I must say, this wild primitivism had nothing in common with the refined primitiveness of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and refinement of gesture were great and sacred concepts.”

That’s a great reaction to have.

But wait, as Ron Popeil would say, there’s more:

In the years immediately preceding World War I, Roerich sensed an impending cataclysm, and his paintings symbolically depicted the awful scale of the conflict he felt descending upon the world. These works marked the birth of Roerich the “prophet.”

I guess he wasn’t the only one to be worried about an oncoming cataclysm. But this is kinda funny:

By 1917 the revolution was raging in Russia and returning there would have been dangerous. The family began making plans to visit India, whose magnetic appeal had been felt increasingly during these years. This became a possibility in 1918 when Roerich was invited by a Swedish entrepreneur to exhibit his paintings in Stockholm. From there the family proceeded to London, where Sir Thomas Beecham had invited Roerich to design a new production of Prince Igor for the Covent Garden Opera.

And then:

Meanwhile, an invitation to come to America was extended by the Chicago Art Institute. . . . In 1921, in New York, he founded the Master Institute of United Arts . . . The Master Institute flourished, but it did not survive beyond 1937. While the country was in the grips of the Great Depression and the Roerich family was on expedition in the Far East, funds ran out and events caused a complete collapse of the organization that Roerich and his supporters had labored to build. It was not until 1949 that, under the direction of Sina Fosdick, one of the founding board members and an Institute faculty member, the institution was reborn as Nicholas Roerich Museum, in a brownstone on West 107th Street, where it has remained until the present.

Here’s the Master Institute in its glory days:

No, the building of the current Roerich museum is not so impressive. But let’s take a walk outside–way outside:

In May, 1923, the Roerichs were at last on their way to India, where, in that ageless land, amid the snows of the Himalayan range, they sought to turn their thoughts to the Eternal.

This isn’t the kind of prose that Chabon would write directly, but he’d put it in some journalism of that era from some fictional magazine. It’s good period detail.

The Roerichs landed in Bombay in December, 1923, and began a tour of cultural centers and historic sites, meeting Indian scientists, scholars, artists, and writers along the way. . . . They initiated a journey of exploration that would take them into Chinese Turkestan, Altai, Mongolia and Tibet. It was an expedition into untracked regions where they planned to study the religions, languages, customs, and culture of the inhabitants. . . . The trek was at times arduous. Roerich tells us that thirty-five mountain passes from fourteen to twenty-one thousand feet in elevation were crossed. But these were the challenges he felt born for, believing that the rigor of the mountains helped a man to find courage and develop strength of spirit.

Indeed. And the life continues:

At the end of their major expedition, in 1928, the family settled in the Kullu Valley at an elevation of 6,500 feet in the Himalayan foothills, with a magnificent view of the valley and the surrounding mountains. Here they established their home and the headquarters of the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute . . .

Here they are in Ulan Bator:

and Tibet:

Dude’s a peaceful version of Lawrence of Arabia.

What about his paintings? They’re good! Go to the top of this post to see three of them. I like the style, and I like the colors.

After all this, I bet you’re wondering what Roerich looked like. Here’s a phot of someone sculpting him:

Absolutely hilarious how much the sculpture looks like the man. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be a likeness; still, it’s absolutely uncanny. Enough so that, now when I look back at the man’s head, it looks like it’s carved in stone.

And to think, I’d never heard of the guy! If you’d told me that there was a museum devoted to the co-creator of The Right of Spring, an accomplished artist and world traveler who’d founded multiple institutes, with a museum only ten blocks from my home . . . well, I won’t say I wouldn’t have believed you, but I would’ve been surprised. And I was.