Nicholas Roerich: artist, guru, educator, archaeologist, explorer, treaty-maker — and nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize

In the summer of 1927, Nicholas Roerich, his wife Helena and their adult son George finished a three-week trek through the Gobi Desert. Starting in Mongolia, and travelling north to south, they had managed to avoid the gunfire of a merchant who mistook them for bandits. They were now ready to make an ascent to the Tibetan Plateau — several thousands of feet up.

Upon reaching the first outpost in Tibet, the Roerichs handed over their passports and were told to await the authorities’ approval before proceeding. This was supposed to take a few days, but ended up taking five months, meaning the family were consigned to their tents as winter brought with it blizzards and freezing temperatures.

According to Jacqueline Decter, writing in her biography Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master (1989), ‘their money, medicine, and food dwindled fast. It was so cold that… their animals perished before their eyes.’

The family were finally granted permission to leave in March 1928 — thus allowing them to complete, later that year, an expedition through Central Asia that they had begun in 1925.

This remarkable expedition — which started and ended in India, and included spells in China, Siberia and the Himalayas — covered 16,000 miles. Roerich produced numerous pictures on the journey, depicting many places that had never been visited by Westerners before.

Not for nothing is he sometimes known as the ‘Master of the Mountains’, his best-known pictures being ethereal mountain landscapes, examples of which he painted during the Central Asian expedition and for the rest of his career after it.

‘He was a unique figure in 20th-century art,’ says Gvido Trepsa, director of the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York. ‘He took entirely his own path: not really being influenced by artists before him, and not really influencing artists after him.’

Roerich was special, Trepsa believes, because ‘his motivation went far beyond the artistic’. As will be explored below, Roerich was a visionary, for whom art was only part of a fascinating, wider worldview.

Nicholas Roerich was born into a well-to-do family in St Petersburg in 1874. His father was a respected notary. As a boy, Nicholas enjoyed joining archaeological digs around his home region — and, as a young adult, conducted a number of his own. He never lost the thrill of coming into physical contact with earth or with objects of the ancient past. He kept meticulous notes of each dig and ended up amassing a large collection of artefacts, Stone Age ones in particular.

In 1893, Roerich enrolled simultaneously at St Petersburg University and the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, undertaking a degree in law at the former to placate his father, but more interested himself in classes at the latter.

The late 1890s saw a blossoming in Russian arts, especially in Roerich’s home city, where the young Serge Diaghilev was a key figure of the avant-garde. One of Diaghilev’s first achievements was co-founding The World of Art, an influential art magazine, on the editorial board of which Roerich sat.

The magazine inspired a movement of the same name, both of them broadly Symbolist in outlook. Much of Roerich’s work from the early 20th century — archetypal paintings of old Slavic rites and legends — might best be described as Symbolist. It gives a sense that there’s a realm of meaning deeper than what is depicted in the picture.

Examples include Idols (1901) and The Forefathers (1911) — the former a vision of a pagan site of sacrifice, the latter a scene of a hilltop piper charming bears with his tunes.

Both pictures reveal the richness of colour for which Roerich was renowned throughout his career. Indeed, in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to see planet Earth from outer space, he wrote in his log of seeing ‘an indescribable palette of colours. Just like the canvases of the artist Nicholas Roerich!’

Diaghilev was determined to bring Russian culture to the attention of Western Europeans. In 1906, he organised an exhibition of old and new Russian art at Paris’s Grand Palais, including 16 works by Roerich.

The duo’s most famous collaborations, however, came a few years later, when Diaghilev launched his dance company, the Ballets Russes. Roerich would design the debut production of its infamous ballet The Rite of Spring, for which Igor Stravinsky wrote the score.

The work tapped into his love of things ancient — evoking the primitive rites of prehistoric man as he welcomed spring — and was unlike any ballet before it. Though today deemed a modernist masterpiece, at the time it caused bedlam. Roerich said of the premiere, in Paris on 29 May 1913, that ‘the audience whistled and roared so that nothing could even be heard’.

More positive was the response to Diaghilev’s production of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov based on medieval legend. Roerich designed a stage curtain which was lowered for the symphonic interlude (when no performers were on stage), marking an important battle scene.

At its debut performance, which took place at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, the audience was stunned by the dynamism of Roerich’s composition and the intense juxtaposition of colours (flaming reds with emerald greens). His depiction of the Battle of Kerzhenets helped render the scene’s tension almost palpable. It also induced loud applause, forcing the stage manager to lower the curtain 12 times, following 12 failed attempts to continue the show by raising it.

In 1915, Roerich contracted pneumonia and was advised by his doctor to recuperate in Finland. He was still there two years later, when the Russian Revolution took place. No admirer of the Bolsheviks, he stayed away from home, spending short spells in Stockholm and London before boarding a ship with his family for the US in 1920.

He swiftly oversaw the exhibition of nearly 200 of his paintings there, which toured nationwide. He also founded the Master Institute of United Arts in New York, which taught music, drama, ballet, fine arts and architecture under one roof. The choreographer Michel Fokine and the artist George Bellows were among those who gave classes. The school grew so popular that, within a few years, it had moved into a purpose-built skyscraper known as the Master Building, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

‘Art has many branches, yet all are one,’ wrote Roerich in the institute’s mission statement. ‘The light of art will ignite innumerable hearts with a new love.’

In the mid-1920s, Roerich realised a long-held dream of visiting India. He met with numerous scientists and scholars there, before setting out on the aforementioned epic journey through Central Asia.

Roerich’s paintings from this time started to reflect his crystallising worldview, notably a series called ‘Banners of the East’, which portrayed major religious teachers from across history (Confucius, Jesus Christ, Buddhist monks et al) carrying out spiritual tasks. This was testament to what Roerich increasingly came to see as the unity of religious striving. The more he travelled, the more convinced he became of the common roots of all people’s faith — and of what he called the ‘thread’ that joined all people’s existence.

Roerich was in his mid-fifties by the end of the Asian expedition. After it, he and his wife would settle — pretty much for good — in the Kullu Valley in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. Not that he had retirement in mind. Roerich set up the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute, which conducted studies into regional botany, medicine, archaeology and linguistics.

There were also other feats, far too numerous to list here. These included launching, with his wife Helena, the hugely popular practice of Agni Yoga; and directing a US Department of Agriculture expedition to China and Mongolia in search of drought-resistant grasses that might help to bring land in the Dust Bowl back into productive use.

Roerich also conceived a milestone treaty to protect cultural treasures during wartime. The Roerich Pact was duly signed in the White House in 1935 by representatives of 21 nations, in the presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US president. ‘The concept of Culture must arouse in us the consonant concept of Unity,’ Roerich said. ‘We are tired of destruction and common misunderstanding.’ His work on the pact saw Roerich nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Artistically, the style of his mature years was more laconic than before, imbued with a sense of space that was increasingly abstract and spiritual. Landscapes had always featured in Roerich’s art, reflecting a lifelong affinity with nature, but human presence within them grew less marked over time, almost to the point of disappearance.

This was perhaps inevitable as mountain scenes, painted in and around the Himalayas, came to dominate his oeuvre. Yet the landscapes themselves were now captured in less detail, contributing to their sense of majesty.

‘On the roof of the world, he found the painterly image that linked outer reality and inner revelation,’ wrote Kenneth Archer in his book Roerich: East and West (1999). Archer suggested that, through painting mountains, Roerich achieved a spiritual connection with the cosmos.

In his latter years, Roerich sported a long white beard and continued to travel. The locals around Kullu called him ‘Guru’. Roerich died in 1947, aged 73. His friend Jawaharlal Nehru, newly appointed as India’s first prime minister, gave the eulogy at his funeral. Nehru praised the way that he had ‘lit up so many aspects of human endeavour’.

Roerich is still considered such a significant figure in India today that he is one of just nine artists whose work it’s legally impossible to export, alongside Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil.

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York recently celebrated its centenary, the artist having opened it in 1923. For a time, it shared space in the Master Building with the Master Institute of United Arts. A funding crisis brought on by the Great Depression, however, forced the school’s closure, and the museum is today housed in an Upper West Side townhouse.

According to its director, Roerich’s career must be viewed holistically. Trepsa says, ‘It’s impossible to separate his art from his other pursuits: as an educator, an archaeologist, a peace-maker, and so on.’ Roerich revered the eternal forces of nature — while also, in Trepsa’s words, seeing an essential ‘connection between humans of different times and places’. This despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he lived through two world wars and a revolution in his homeland.

Art, for Roerich, was fundamentally an expression of the brotherhood of man. As he himself poetically put it, ‘Beneath the sign of beauty, we all walk joyfully.’

The year 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of Nicholas Roerich’s birth. To commemorate the event, the Nicholas Roerich Museum is showing 150 works by the artist from its collection