Vol. 36 No. 25 - I AM the Witness - June 20, 1993
INDIAN EXPRESS
MARCH 7, 1993
THE VISION BEHIND A
HIMALAYAN LEGACY
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When Svetoslav Roerich died recently, he left behind numerous works of art, some of which have not even been properly accounted for. What will happen to these fascinating canvases that reveal the artist’s deep empathy with nature and his fellow human beings? |
by Marta Jakimowicz-Karle
SVETOSLAV Roerich, who died last month, left behind some 2,000 paintings. Although these were frequently exhibited in India, Russia and elsewhere, not many have seen the work of this remarkable mystic-painter. The fate of his private collection, like the fate of his estate, is not yet certain. As fierce a pacifist as his father before him, Svetoslav was instrumental in the signing of the UNESCO convention for the protection of museums and art galleries from war. But how far his own works will be protected remains to be seen.
In order to understand Svetoslav Roerich one has to go back to his father, Nicholas Roerich, an important Russian painter. In a certain sense, Svetoslav’s work was the development of the legacy he inherited from his illustrious father. This legacy was the European Neo-Romantic ethos of the late nineteenth century, with its belief in the refined, noble and spiritually uplifting character of ancient and exotic cultures.
Aesthetic, literary and philosophical inspirations gained from such sources were shaped into fairy-tale-like visions of a perfect world, superior and preferable to contemporary mundanehess.
The early modernists like Degas, Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec or Matisse, and particularly the practitioners of Art Nouveau, transformed mainly Japanese art motifs. India, on the other hand, served as a spiritual stimulus.
When the Svetoslav family left their native St. Petersburg after the Revolution, they moved to Sweden, England and the USA. In their pursuit of a mythical Shangri-la, they also undertook prolonged expeditions to the Himalayas, covering areas from India to China and Mongolia and imbibing the wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. Eventually, in 1933, the Roerichs setfled down in an estate at Nagar in the Kulu Valley. The place, situated at the foot of the Dhauladhars, embodied for Nicholas Roerich a peaceful and joyous communion of nature, man and the divine.
The close symbiotic relationship between Svetoslav and his mentor-father was to prove a greater shaping force in his artistic development than his stay at Columbia and Harvard. Even though devoid of the idols and mythological personages which populated Nicholas Roerich’s sceneries, his son’s first mature work retains the former’s composition and atmosphere. Wide hill vistas ascend and come down in rugged, angular rhythms and float over long yet powerful slopes.
The gentle or tumultuous sinuousness of Art Nouveau’s flowing rhythms and the mannered arching outlines come out fully in the figural scenes of the 1940s. In fact, the relatively individual work of Svetoslav Roerich shows his dependence on quite identifiable sources which lay at the beginning of his father’s idiom and which were transcended by the older painter. The son’s ouevre makes the viewer recall Gaugin and the stances of his oriental nodes echoed in the vaulted landscapes Svetoslav is fond of painting.
Roerich’s paintings, however, have incorporated a degree of prettiness and sentimentality. The silhouettes range from a turn-of-the-century, theatricality to a mild Blake-like S-shape to ‘nicely’ stylised and simplified rustic beauties. The images exude the artist’s delight in native types and his vision of their emotive response to nature’s own moods, be it a threatening storm or a gaily unfolding spring, is just a little melodramatic. Svetoslav’s ladies (one hesitates to use the word ‘women’) are delicate, innocently sensual, sensitive and calm. The same style is applied also to his allegorical groups of edifying content.
The Himalayan phase and the decoratively dramatic Art Nouveau tradition merged during the subsequent decades, particularly the ‘60s and ‘70s. Full of saturated, bright, expressively contrasting colours, a multitude of smallish canvases depict various picturesque scenes–rocks and low hills, river valleys, rich green trees, village huts and grids of cultivated fields. Their undulating rhythms, which may resemble sea waves, bind the vast spreading forms into a sort of design. Sometimes they incline towards an almost naturalistic rendering, though, more frequently, these also tend towards the stylised and patterned.
ALTHOUGH his spirit was dedicated to religious and spiritual ideals, Svetoslav Roerich walked on earth and responded directly to the people he met. More than his symbolic compositions, one appreciates some of the unpretentious studies of Indian village children, where the stylised and the decorative have imbibed elements of the touchingly real.
It is portraiture proper, however, which stands witness to his involvement with actual persons. Svetoslav, the portrait painter, began from a practically 19th-century academic realism. In the 1940s, although his work was very correct and professional, it did not soar. A certain acutely finished detailing and posed directness combine there with a dose of idealisation and sweetness, which are meant to enhance physical beauty and delicacy as well as spirituality. At this point, one remembers his portraits of his wife, the legendary Devika Rani. Here, the intimacy and warmth result in pleasant images. Some of his other portraits, however, prove to be fairly conventional. He was frequently commissioned to paint portraits of Indian political leaders, probably because Roerich was by now an internationally important figure and his style of portraiture–with its hint of a western search for Indian spirituality–was much admired.
Ever the realist, Roerich spoke against abstraction in art and the unnecessary distortion of natural beauty. His later portraits, accordingly, continue the previous tone, but become increasingly photographic in their idealised naturalism. The style often turns sugary, whether he depicts Devika Rani, a youthful and sensual society lady or a modest working class woman. The gently glamourous pose prevails among strong, bright colours, emphatic make-up and atmospheric background hues which may include Art Nouveau floral fantasies.
Christian themes recur throughout Roerich’s career, but his last years culminated in large images of Jesus, saints and angels. Their didactic message is expressed through the use of symbols and allegories, doll-like faces and heavenly colours in misty gradations. But, instead of being harshly evaluated, they should be taken as evidence of the artist’s longing for a pure anchoring in life beyond death.
Likewise, the phenomenon of Roerich as an embodiment of a specific kind of humanism overshadows his significance as a painter. Much respected, awarded and honoured in India and abroad, Roerich deeply believed in the transforming abilities of art. Hence, he strove to endow it with a feel of pan-natural harmony, peace, truthfulness, ethics and religious values. As he grew older, these became etched on his work and, indeed, on his very mien. He spent most of his long life on an estate near Bangalore, where he was active, being particularly associated with the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath.
Today, a representative collection of the work of both the father and son is housed here, an abiding reminder of their long love affair with this land and its people.
Behind the canvas
FOR years they had been out of the limelight, living a quiet life of exquisite luxury and solitude in their Tatguni Estate, 20 km from Bangalore. Then last year, Svetoslav Roerich and Devika Rani found themselves pinned under a murky spotlight of property tangles and charges of drugged senility. And it did not take long to shatter the fragile beauty of their retired life, till then carefully shaded from the glare of public scrutiny.
The first lady of Indian cinema and her Russian painter husband had been, for years, in the magic circle reserved only for the top among the glitterati. Once acclaimed as the most beautiful woman of the Indian silver screen, Devika Rani had taken glamour and scandal in her stride, living her own life, not compromised by the claustrophobic norms of a hypocritical society. Belonging to the aristocratic Tagore family of Bengal (she was a grand-niece of Rabindranath) helped, especially to maintain her dignity while venturing into an area then frequented only by social outcastes.
Not only did Devika Rani carve a niche for herself in filmdom, but with the unflagging support of her first husband, filmmaker Himanshu Rai of Bombay Talkies, she took on roles that other actresses shied away from. For example in Karma, the first Indian talkie in English, she created a furore with a kissing scene way back in 1933. Never mind that the man she was kissing on screen also happened to be her husband. Apart from the aura of scandal and exquisite beauty, her remarkable talents as an actress, evident in films like Achhut Kanya, added to her image as the leading lady of Indian showbiz.
Even after the death of Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani refused to fall into the mould of the traditional Indian widow. She fell in love and married Svetoslav Roerich, a Russian painter who had made India his home. The Roerichs were aristocratic exiles from Russia, the name made immortal by Svetoslav’s father Nicholas, an internationally acclaimed painter. It was a powerful union of souls, where two very sensitive individuals from extraordinary backgrounds built a life together.
Just as her first husband had made her the heartthrob of India by putting her squarely in the limelight, Devika Rani’s second husband weaned her away from it. They escaped into their spacious estate, and settled down in a quiet bungalow amidst lush green meadows and Linolae trees miles from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. The queen of the silverscreen was content to be the queen of Svetoslav’s dreams alone, posing for his paintings and travelling the world.
But the champagne years were bound to lose their fizz. The artist couple gave in to the demands of time, moving out of their home of 40 years in Tatguni Estate and into a five-star hotel more approachable to doctors and friends. And cornered by age and illness, they suddenly found themselves in the glare of the spotlight once again as their estate ran into trouble for no fault of theirs.
They fought the Bangarappa regime in Karnataka’s move to acquire their 457-acre estate along with the paintings and artefacts they possessed from a room in Hotel Ashok. For a while, they even decided to leave the country and move to Russia. But that was not to be and the “Bengali Tigress” and the Russian artist fought off the government’s move to acquire the estate for Rs 5 crore, as well as a stray coffee planter’s claim that he had already bought the property from them for Rs 1.5 crore. The Russian embassy intervened, showing an interest in “preserving the Roerich heritage” and the couple decided to hand over the estate to a trust, for which they consulted family friends like Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and S. D. Sharma. The murky affair was brought to an end when the new Karnataka chief minister Veerappa Moily decided to guard the estate on behalf of the Roerichs. And the octagenarian couple was finally left alone.
But the scandal and dispute had destroyed an important aspect of their life: peace. It had dealt a stunning blow to the quiet dignity on which they had built their life together. And with Svetoslav Roerich’s death, Devika Rani is left to pick up the pieces of a broken life, quite alien to the lady who epitomises grace. And this time she must do it alone.
–A.D.S.
Reprinted from Indian Express Sunday Magazine, March 7, 1993.
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