The Silver Valley

Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich, an egg-bald Russian with a twin-pronged beard, spent a lifetime seeking peace and, somehow, disturbing everything he touched. Devoted followers thought he was a genius who could unify humanity through art. Loudmouthed Westbrook Pegler thought he was a quack who wanted to become "head" of Siberia.

Quack or genius, Roerich led a busy life that brushed against Eternal Krishna the Regenerator--and the ferrets of the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue; against dreamy Henry Wallace in Washington--and the 363 local gods of the Punjab's Kulu Valley. On Manhattan's Riverside Drive his devotees reared to his name a 29-story skyscraper, graded (like one of his own paintings of Himalayan mountains) from deep purple at the base to white at the top, and hung there 1,000 paintings from his facile brush. St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie devoted a "day" to him. Latvian churches prized his ikons. His paintings hung in 25 countries. League of Nations committees solemnly discussed his "Banner of Peace" (a red circle enclosing three red spheres on a field of white), which would protect religious and cultural buildings from attack in future wars.

Disturbing Echoes. In the early 1930s Roerich was at the pinnacle of worldly fame as painter and poet, Asiatic explorer, archeologist and mystic philosopher. In 1934, Admirer Henry Wallace, then Secretary of Agriculture, sent Roerich and his son George, an Orientalist, to the Gobi Desert, to collect drought-resisting grasses for the U.S. dust bowl. As the serene man who was used to being called "Master" moved through Asia, disturbing echoes reached the U.S. In Manchukuo the Japanese thought he was a Russian agent. The Russians thought he was a Japanese spy. The Chinese thought he was a U.S. spy. The British had denied him a visa into troubled India in 1930, on the grounds that he was a Russian sympathizer.*

Wallace stopped the mission, later said: "The Department [of Agriculture] has no intention of re-employing the Roerichs." In Manhattan, Roerich's chief financial backer, Louis L. Horch, a broker later turned bureaucrat, who had put more than $1,000,000 into the Riverside Drive Museum, went to court to get back control of the building. The thousand paintings were unslung from the museum walls. Later the U.S. Government sued Roerich for back taxes. Pegler devoted 25 columns to suggesting that Wallace wrote letters calling Roerich "Dear Guru" (Teacher).

White Blossoms. Roerich never returned to the U.S. With his wife and son he retired far from the world of Wallaces and Peglers to his beloved Kulu Valley in the Punjab, the "Silver Valley." "Whether in winter," he once wrote, "when the snowy cover sparkles, or in spring, when all the fruit trees are covered with snowy-white blossoms, the valley equally well merits this name." He had noted that its healthy people did not have cancer. There Roerich, drinking in the mysteries of Hindu and Buddhist shrines, also tried to learn what diet or beneficent rays or simple ways of life kept its people free from cancer. Amid the peaceful Himalayan pinnacles last week, at the age of 73, Nicholas Roerich's troubled life ended.

* Roerich, who left Russia at the time of the Revolution, gets faint praise in the Soviet Encyclopedia (1944), though many Roerich paintings still hang in Russian museums. Says the Encyclopedia: "His art is very decorative. His subject matter is taken out of legends, and he treats it in a religio-mystical reactionary style."

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