Nicholas Roerich Museum

Roerich’s Old Pskov (1936) is one of several paintings he made of Pskov, a city in northwestern Russia that has religious structures and artifacts dating back to medieval times. In Realm of Light, Roerich recounts one of the stories about a particular monastery in Pskov: walking out from the monastery, and regarding it from a distance, impenetrable darkness surrounds one. But above the monastery light gloweth. Although the monastery was lit by two kerosene lanterns and two oil lamps, the rest of its light came from a radiance of spirit that Roerich says is also found in sacred places in the Himalayas. If you’d like to read more from Realm of Light, please go to our website, roerich.org, where you can find the full text and buy the book.

Our Museum is pleased to be partnering with the Music for Thought Series to host a virtual event centered around Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The event will start this Sunday, December 13th, at 3pm EST. Supported by the German Consulate of New York, this event will feature a discussion with pianists Hannah Harnest & Markus Kaitila, choreographer Miro Magloire, and dancer Megan Foley about Ritual in 2020. The discussion was filmed in our Museum, with Roerich’s costume and set decorations in the background. Blending music, dance, and discussion, this event will provide an interesting take on Rite of Spring. If you’d like to attend, please register through the Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chosen-a-ritual-in-music-on-ca

Excerpt from the book Adamant by Nicholas Roerich. Please go to our website, roerich.org, if you’d like to read the full text and buy the book. The image depicted is Himalayas, album leaf, painted by Roerich in 1934.

One of Roerich’s most well-known accomplishments is his work on Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Our museum has several sketches he made for the decor and costumes. He worked with Stravinsky before he went on to travel through Central Asia and paint his mountain landscapes, but the echoes of Le Sacre stayed with him. In Beautiful Unity, Roerich reflects on a diary entry he wrote eighteen years after his time with Stravinsky: During these years we have witness...ed how in all of Asia the eternal rhythm of ‘Sacre’ resounds in the holy mountains and in the deserts where the songs are presented, not for human beings, but for the great desert itself. When he was traveling through Kashmir and saw the torch dances of the Spring festival, he thought of the powerful musical concepts of Stravinsky. To read more from Beautiful Unity, please go to our website, roerich.org, where you can read the full text and buy the book.

Roerich’s Mountain Range. Approach to Everest (1936) is a tempera on cardboard study of the landscape surrounding the then-insurmountable peak. In Shambhala, he writes about how the guide pointed to Everest among the shiny white peaks of the Himalayas. This was well before the first successful summit to Everest, as nobody as yet ever ascended this sacred treasury of snows and many had perished in the attempt. To read more from Shambhala, please go to our website, roerich.org, where you can read the full text and buy the book.