Scriabin and the Scriabin Club at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York

In August 2025, Scriabin Club founder Martin Kaptein visited the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York, marking a first personal connection between the Club and one of the city’s distinctive cultural institutions.

The meeting offered an opportunity to speak with the museum’s director about possible future concerts and collaborations, while friends of the Scriabin Club were also given an introduction to the museum and its collection.

The encounter felt particularly natural because of the close artistic and spiritual affinities between Alexander Scriabin and Nicholas Roerich. Although their artistic languages were different, both were deeply concerned with questions of transformation, spirituality, colour, and the place of art within a larger vision of human culture. During the visit, these parallels were discussed in relation to both Scriabin’s music and Roerich’s paintings.

The visit also confirmed a visual connection that has long felt appropriate to the Scriabin Club: Roerich’s imagery forms a fitting counterpart to Scriabin’s musical and philosophical world, and his paintings have consequently become an important source of visual inspiration for the Club’s website.

Another subject of conversation was the cultural ideal represented by the Roerich Pact and its Banner of Peace, with its well-known three-circle symbol. At its core lies the conviction that culture and cultural institutions deserve active protection and recognition at the highest level of society. This idea strongly resonates with the mission of the Scriabin Club: not only to perform and study Scriabin’s music, but also to contribute to a living cultural environment in which music, thought, research, and artistic exchange can meet.

The visit was therefore not simply an encounter with a museum, but the beginning of a relationship that we hope may lead to further artistic exchanges and performances in the future.

For anyone visiting New York, the Nicholas Roerich Museum, at 319 West 107th Street, is warmly recommended. Admission is free, and the museum offers a remarkably quiet and contemplative atmosphere in the middle of the city — an especially fitting place to spend time with Roerich’s paintings and the ideas behind them.