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ArtS I met them purely by chance: Kenneth Archer — art historian and scenic consultant — and his wife, Millicent Hodson: dance historian and choreographer. This was some years ago: in 2009, in fact. I was at an international symposium on the celebrated Russian painter, Nicholas Roerich, at the Jamia Millia Islamiya, and so were they: I, by no means an expert in this area, was presenting a paper on ‘Landscape in Indian art’ in general, and those two, thoroughbred experts on Roerich, a paper on his contribution to the stage and stage design. When we were together, informally, at tea, I think, we got talking and I discovered that they lived in the Hampstead area of London. I was so struck by the coincidence, for two old art-historian friends, William Archer and his wife, also used to live in the same Hampstead area years ago. Light-heartedly, it was agreed that I should be calling them "The Archers of Hampstead".
A kind of friendship developed, and though I have not seen them since those days, we have kept in touch, they writing to me from time to time about the exciting things they are doing in their field: now in St Petersburg, now in Hamburg, one day in Nice, the next in Paris. The main, and obviously truly spectacular, event in their lives recently has been the reconstruction of one of the great ballets and orchestral works of the last 100 years, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps — the Rites of Spring, in other words — in which four great names had come together: the composer himself of course; Diaghilev, cultural impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes; Nijinsky, the great choreographer; and Nicholas Roerich, painter and stage designer, among other things. When the piece was staged in 1913, the audience fumed, and there was a near riot. Later, however, over time, that revolutionary piece came to acquire the status of a classic, something heard and seen with awe to this day. The Archers of Hampstead were part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of the premiere of that event at several places, they wrote to me. But, in so many ways, this seems to be the season for Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), too. Exhibitions are being held, symposia organised, books written. And it is in that connection that the Archers of Hampstead drew my attention recently to a long article that Kenneth wrote several years ago. The theme? Demythologising Roerich. He is right today, as he was right when he wrote that piece: no one has ever doubted the gifts of Nicholas Roerich as a painter; at the same time, there are his detractors, who have not stopped painting him as a fake mystic, a financial manipulator, even as a spy for his country in the years that the Great Game was being played out in the Himalayan region. Some samples of the views taken of Nicholas Roerich by different people are of great interest in this context. Claude Bragdon, American architect and writer, once wrote: "In the history of fine arts, certain individuals have appeared from time to time whose work has a unique, profound, and, indeed, a mystical quality, which differentiates it from their contemporaries, making it impossible to classify them in any known category or to ally them with any school, because they resemble themselves only - and one another, like some spaceless and timeless order of initiates. Such were Leonardo, Rembrandt, D`FCrer, Blake`85 for their work shows flashes of that daemonic and eerie beauty, which is the sign whereby they may be identified as belonging to that mythical mystic brotherhood. `85Roerich in his life, in his character and in his art, reveals himself as a member of this fraternity".
In a like strain, the American art critic, Barnet Conlan, wrote in his monograph on Roerich: "And now when the Wheel of Time is bringing us once more to another ending and a fresh beginning, a great painter, Nicholas Roerich, sounds the note of dawn and resolutely leads the way towards a renaissance of the Spirit`85 If Pheidias was the creator of divine form, and Giotto, the painter of the Soul, then Roerich may be said to reveal the spirit of the Cosmos". With this kind of breathless prose around, there were bound to be questions, jealousies, re-evaluation, some of these fuelled by the fact that Roerich had left his homeland in 1917, stayed on in the United States, left, or was forced to leave, that country too, settled here in British India, at Naggar in the Kulu valley, organised a great expedition into Central Asia, gathered a large following, spoke in a philosophical language that few perhaps could understand. A very unfriendly critic, Robert Williams, described Nicholas Roerich, thus, on the first page of his book on Russian art: "A bald man with a pointed beard and dark eyes`85, he quickly discovered in America that he could get more money for his mysticism than for his art. Usually dressed in a Tibetan prayer robe, Roerich spoke little English and preferred to let his followers do the talking regarding the master." Something like this was picked up by another writer, John Bowlt: "Although commanding wide respect as a painter, stage designer, anthropologist, and poet, especially among contemporary Soviet historians, Roerich occupies an uneasy position in the development of 20th century Russian culture. Often his artistic achievements are overshadowed by the less auspicious traits of his personality - by his constant self-glorification, financial wheelings and dealings, and his exaggerated interest in eastern religion, which some observers see as little more than charlatanism`85." Where then, one asks, does the truth lie? As Kenneth Archer wrote: "A body of myth, like a mist, has accumulated around the name, Roerich," something that needs to be dispersed. But it is not easy. This, apart from the fact that it is in our character first to create icons and then point to their clay feet. To pronounce judgment on Nicholas is problematic. Especially, here in India where he was seen as a Maharishi, like the great seers of old, and where men of great stature and integrity — Radhakrishnan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Tagore, among them — spoke of him with respect and enthusiasm. Towards the end of his old article, Kenneth Archer — great admirer as he is of Roerich's prodigious gifts — decided to speak of him at length as a Symbolist painter, for that is how his work needs to be evaluated. Perhaps that is the thing to do. And to go back to Nicholas Roerich’s abiding work, in which an early writer saw, "the tender violet-like amethysts of snows at dawn, the emerald-like grass of his prairies, the pale turquoise of his northern skies, the mother-of-pearl of his clouds, the jasper and malachite of his rocks, the amber and rubies of his sunsets"
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