A lot of outstanding painters were born in Russia in the 20th century. Nowadays, the country’s avant-garde artists are world-renowned discoverers of new, amazingly daring art forms and original aesthetic concepts. Among them was a master of synthetic vision who, working in a classical style, arrived at surprisingly lofty generalizations of spiritual and cultural values.
The name of the painter is Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947). His personality can be compared only with the titans of the Renaissance, as he was not only a painter, but also a world-famous archeologist, a writer, a poet, and explorer, a thinker, and a public figure. It is to him that the idea of the “Red Cross of Culture” belongs. Known generally as the Roerich Pact, it was expressed in the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The artist offered a symbol for the protective Banner of Peace, which he painted in his canvas Madonna Oriflamma (1932).
Nicholas Roerich thought not only about material monuments but also about the future and the moral standards of mankind. On the eve of World War I, the master executed a series of canvases (e.g., Last Angel, 1912), which art critics called oracular, and which made the Russian writer Maxim Gorky call the painter a person of great intuition.
The artist awaited the New Era, which he considered to be an epoch of spiritual and moral perfection, a gate to the Kingdom of God on the earth. Like a hero of his canvas, Pilgrim of the Radiant City (1933), he set out in search of the temple of Transfiguration. Traveling around the world, Nicholas Roerich saw at first hand the commonness of spiritual aspirations of humanity, and the imperishable value and the vitality of ethical precepts of great Teachers. Enamored of the East, he tried to find there the origins of wisdom and the attractive examples of World Enlighteners who are so necessary to mankind. The painter used to say that they were the exponents of people’s best strivings, and a veritable adornment of our planet. The Mother of the World — the great feminine principle in the Universe — inspired them to perform feats.
They illuminate the Earth by the fiery Light which burns the darkness of ignorance. In a similar way, the master’s canvases are imbued with universal beauty, influence people’s consciousness, and, quoting Dostoyevsky’s words, they will save the world. As a symbolist, Nicholas Roerich dreamt of the transformation of our life with the help of beauty, and he remained its true priest and prophet up to the end of his life.