Return of Roerich

Nicholas Roerich, demigod to many an esthete in the U. S., South America, Russia and the European capitals and to many a monk and nomad of Central Asia, returned to Manhattan last week. With him was his son George, Harvard orientalist. More than four years they have spent ranging through the mountains and plateau deserts of Tibet, studying peoples, religions, archaeology, terrain. Explorer Roerich had painted mystically--panoramas, portraits, and haze-curtained lines of his own imagining. At Darjeeling, India, where his party recuperated from mountain rigors (for five months once they were beleaguered at 40DEG below zero), dark, deep-eyed men went to gaze raptly at his paintings. In Manhattan, while waiting for his return, esthetes pored over hundreds of his other paintings.

Nicholas Roerich, now 55, migrated to the U. S. eight years ago. In Russia he was painter, archaeologist, linguist, mystic of repute. He hoped that Beauty and Art would bring Oriental and Occidental cultures together and keep the earth forever at peace. The War and Russian turbulences balked him. So he went to the U. S. to find money, without which not even religion can spread. His reputation, which neither the U. S., British, German or French Who's Who yet record, went ahead of him to a few artists and mystics. They formed a circle which widened. Money came to Nicholas Roerich and his hopes. His acolytes created for him Corona Mundi (Crown of the World) International Art Centre, and gathered together a thin frame of art from all nations of the earth.

They sent loan exhibitions through the U. S. to museums, public schools, libraries, prisons and to major South American cities. They established a Roerich Museum in Manhattan to hold as many of his paintings as they could get. The museum now has 750 Roerichs; European galleries and individuals own some 2,500. They sent him to Central Asia. While he was away they financed and recently started for him a 24-story Master Building in Manhattan, looking across the Hudson River at the factories of New Jersey. That dank, uncompleted Master Building was where the Roerich acolytes received him and his son last week.