Tent Mountain 1933

Nicholas Roerich’s ‘Tent Mountain’ is a landscape of monumental forms, built with thin layers of tempera on canvas. Just imagine Roerich working on this; he’s building up the image from the back to the front, starting with the sky and working his way down through the mountains. The color palette is limited, muted with blues, pinks, and greens. It reminds me of an old fresco. The lines and shapes are simplified into planes, giving the landscape an almost theatrical quality. It's as if Roerich is staging the world. Maybe he was thinking about the relationship between landscape and theater. I wonder if Roerich thought about how his paintings would sit alongside the landscapes of the Hudson River School painters? I bet he did. Artists are always talking to one another across time. They leave us clues in the residue of their work. It’s up to us to find them.