Restoring Roerich Legacy
At Guru Pooja an Indian friend sent me a newspaper article which I was able to read only now. It was from The Deccan Herald of 23 October 2011 about the Russian artist Svetoslav Roerich (23 Oct. 1904-30 Jan. 1993), the son of the famous mystic and painter Nicholas Roerich and of Helena Roerich, also a profound writer and mystic. Svetoslavand his elder brother George had been born in St. Petersburg, but had been living nearly all of his life in India, mainly in Bangalore where he died 3 February 1993.
The occasion for the article was the close of a long legal fight, a drama over the legacy of the Tataguni estate owned by Roerich’s wife, the late actress Devaki Rani, niece of Rabindranath Tagore. The litigation had started right after Roerichs death and only now came to and end with a decision of the Indian Supreme Court entrusting the State government with the responsibility of maintaining the estate, which contains numerous paintings by Nicholas ans Svetoslav Roerich. However, the paintings have suffered fungal infestation with many of them flaking. Experts are now chemically treating each of these affected paintings, a process that might take over a year.
I was happy to hear about this news, for I love Nicholas Roerich’s paintings very much and have blogged about him already at several occasions. There is a website of the Roerich and Devika Rani Roerich Estate Board, which gives paintings of Svetoslav and Nicholas Roerich – though it hasn’t been updated for years.
I had to think of Nicholas Roerich yesterday evening when two items were distributed to the group which members from the Littoral Group, Santa Fe, Argentina, had brought: A red sign of the Agni Yoga society founded by Roerich and his wife, with the 3 red dots in a circle, and a photo from the highest mountain of the Andes, the Aconcagua, shining in blue like Roerich’s paintings and saying – From the South of the South,with love – thank you Marta!
Newspaper clippings from the Deccan Herald
