John McCannon - Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King

physician, a former tsarist colonel, a fu­ture priest, a Harvard-educated scholar of Asian languages, and two teenaged girls. Leading them were a middle-aged woman of aristocratic bearing and her husband, a bald, bearded painter of small frame and medium height. His name was Nicholas Roerich.

Before setting out, Roerich had told the world that his journey's aims were artistic and academic. He wished to paint the Hi­malayas and other remote parts of Asia. An amateur archaeologist and ethnographer, he hoped to study the myths and folklore of this poorly understood corner of the earth. He completed his canvases and conducted his research, but kept his primary goal a se­cret from the press and the public: Roerich went to the east desiring to locate the leg­endary kingdom of Shambhala and, using it as a foundation, establish a pan-Buddhist state of his own, encompassing Mongolia, Central Asia, the Himalayas, and parts of Siberia. Fulfilling this "Great Plan," he be­lieved, would give a final turn to the cosmic wheel. Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, would manifest himself and shepherd the world through apocalypse to an age of peace and beauty.

Roerich's expedition, of course, ush­ered in no such epoch. He failed even to reach Lhasa, and his party was expelled from Tibet after a brutal—and, for some, fatal—winter in the highlands. This did not stop him from claiming fame on the order of explorers like Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein, and Roy Chapman Andrews. Seven years later, he received another chance to bring his Great Plan to fruition, during a trip sponsored by one of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet members and paid for by the US government. This second venture faltered as badly as the first, precipitating scandals that influenced the outcome of no fewer than three presidential elections.

In his seventy-three-year lifetime, Ro- erich came to know the world's most famous artists, celebrities, and political leaders. He baffled foreign-affairs and intelligence ser­vices in half a dozen countries. Thousands saw in him a profound, if not divinely in­spired, humanitarian, while others thought him a fraud or a madman. One of his colleagues, the art historian Igor Grabar, remarked with bemusement that "about Roerich, one could write a most fascinating novel."¹ Indeed, his tale is worthy of the pen of a Jules Verne or a Rudyard Kipling, whose Himalayan-adventuring antiheroes in The Man Who Would Be King are matched by the artist for sheer audacity. It is all the more remarkable for being true.

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Roerich is a household name in his native Russia, and he has a reputation in India, where he lived for more than twenty years. Those who have heard of him in Europe and North America tend to know one or two aspects of what was an extraordinarily complicated life. He is familiar to specialists in Russian art and to aficionados of ballet and opera, and scholars of American history still study his impact on FDR-era politics. Fans of his visually distinctive art continue to grow in number, in the West as well as in Russia, and his following among "new age" devotees is correspondingly large. His fame is not meager, but better thought of as oddly compartmentalized.

Even a partial list of Roerich's accom­plishments should make all but the most incurious wish to hear more about him. He designed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and, with Igor Stravinsky, cowrote the libretto for The Rite of Spring; his sets and costumes were onstage when the ballet made its im­mortal premiere in 1913. Before the commu­nist takeover of 1917, Roerich became Rus­sia's most renowned painter of scenes from Slavic antiquity, and he rose to direct one of the country's largest art schools; among those studying under him was a young Marc Chagall. After the revolution, Roerich and his family emigrated to England, where he befriended H. G. Wells and modern India's greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore. He then went to America, making his mark as an artist, explorer, and peace activist. To house his art and his many enterprises, his supporters erected a landmark skyscraper that still towers over Manhattan's Riverside Drive. The 1925-1928 expedition added not just to his own stature, but to the larger Tibetomania that inspired James Hilton to create the Himalayan dreamland of Shan­gri-La in his 1933 bestseller, Lost Horizon. Roerich's efforts on behalf of a treaty to protect art and architecture in times of war—the so-called Roerich Pact, signed into law by the United States and twen­ty-one other nations in 1935—earned him praise from George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt, and mul­tiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1930s, Roerich and his circle entered into a relationship with the US secretary of agriculture and future vice president, Henry A. Wallace, and, for a time, had the ear of President Roosevelt himself. In his old age, residing in the Punjab, the artist became a favorite of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and it was Nehru who deliv­ered the eulogy when Roerich died in 1947.

In various and sometimes curious ways, Roerich's influence has persisted and grown. Every American encounters him on a daily basis without knowing it: the inclu­sion of the Great Seal's Eye of Providence on the one-dollar bill, part of the currency redesign carried out in 1935 by treasury sec­retary Henry Morgenthau, was suggested by Henry Wallace, with approval and en­couragement from Roerich. The cosmo­naut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to gaze upon the earth from space, likened this unprecedented experience to his first encounter with Roerich's paintings.² In 1974, on the centenary of Roerich's birth, India's prime minister Indira Gandhi dubbed him a "combination of modern savant and ancient rishi" Between 1987 and 1991, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev established the grand museum complex in downtown Mos­cow that, until 2017, was administered by the International Center of the Roerichs. The Hague convention governing the treatment of cultural property during times of armed conflict is modeled in large part on Ro­erich's 1935 pact.⁴ In recent years, his paint­ings have fetched steadily higher prices at auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, and they form part of many key collections of Russian art.^s

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But to all this, there is a shadow y under­side. Stravinsky once said of Roerich that "he looked as though he ought to have been a mystic or a spy."⁶ And while the composer had his own reasons for casting his onetime friend in such suspicious light, Roerich was self-avowedly the former and, if not literally the latter, close enough to make the distinc­tion semantic.

No later than 1905, Roerich and his wife Helena took up a variety of esoteric doctrines and practices, among them The- osophy. By itself, this was nothing strange: the Victorian-era crisis of faith caused Euro­peans in huge numbers to embrace alterna­tive spiritualities as a way of "searching for a soul," to borrow Carl Jung's phrase, in an increasingly secular world.⁷ Public figures drawn to such beliefs, whether temporar­ily or permanently, include Arthur Conan Doyle, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, the inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Russia was part of this trend, and so much in its forefront that, as the historian Maria Carlson has observed, studying late tsarist Russia with­out reference to the occult is like studying medieval Europe without reference to Ro­man Catholicism.⁸ In such an environment, it would have seemed almost more odd not to experiment with mysticism. Even so, by the early 1910s, the Roerichs

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