Prince Igor Campaign 1942

Nicholas Roerich made this painting of the Prince Igor Campaign, and I love how he makes a sweeping historical scene feel so immediate. The colors have this incredible flatness, like old tempera paints, and the scene is laid out in bands of color: the blue night sky, the yellow-orange dawn, and the dark land where the soliders wait to march. The pigment is brushed on smoothly, almost like a mural, but it also has this matte quality, like folk art. And that dark eclipse is so spooky and strange! Is it a good omen, or a bad one? The shapes are all simplified, so the soldiers appear as a unified mass. It feels like a dream, like a memory, like one of those Arthur Rackham paintings, but stranger, almost psychedelic. It reminds you that art is a conversation across time, always changing.