Nukus Museum of Art
Interesting facts
- Savitsky first trained as an electrician, deliberately choosing a proletarian trade in Moscow before going on to study graphic art and painting.
- The painter Vladimir Lysenko spent much of his life confined to a psychiatric hospital because of his art; his painting The Bull is now the museum's emblem.
- The collection includes about 1,000 paintings, sketches and studies by Tarasov, plus some 400 paintings and 1,600 graphic works by Stavrovsky.
- Its holdings of Alexander Volkov, around a hundred paintings, are the largest of any museum in the world.
- Among the Russian avant-garde names Savitsky gathered were Lyubov Popova, Robert Falk, Kliment Redko, Solomon Nikritin and the mystical Amaravella group.
- Several artists in the collection were persecuted under Stalin; Mikhail Kurzin, for one, was imprisoned and exiled for alleged anti-Soviet propaganda.
- Local Karakalpak officials knew something of what Savitsky was buying but did not stop him, allowing banned works to accumulate in a remote provincial museum.
- Before the museum existed, Savitsky spent about nine years, from 1957 to 1966, building up a collection of Karakalpak jewellery, carpets, coins and costume.
- In the 2010 documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art, Savitsky's words are voiced by Ben Kingsley.
- Savitsky is also regarded as the founder of a Karakalpak school of landscape painting, and Uzbekistan honoured him posthumously with an order in 2002.
Why it is worth it
In Nukus, a provincial capital in the far west of Uzbekistan close to the shrinking Aral Sea, hangs one of the world's largest collections of Soviet avant-garde art. The State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, named after its founder Igor Savitsky, holds more than 82,000 items, around 10,000 of them works of the avant-garde; only the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg has more. Many of these paintings were made by artists whose styles were condemned under Stalin, and they survived largely because a single collector, far from Moscow, chose to save them.
Savitsky, a painter, archaeologist and collector born in Kyiv in 1915, first came to the region in 1950 with the Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic expedition led by Sergey Tolstov, and eventually settled in Nukus. He began by gathering Karakalpak jewellery, carpets, coins, clothing and other folk art, and the museum, founded in 1966 with Savitsky as its first curator, also holds finds from the ancient Khorezm fortresses. He went on to collect modern painting, seeking out banned artists and their heirs and buying canvases that had been hidden or forgotten, from Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist experiments to the vivid Central Asian scenes of the so-called Uzbek avant-garde. Most of what he bought was never put on show in his lifetime, and the collection's importance became widely recognised only after perestroika and Uzbek independence in 1991.
The museum holds around a hundred works by Alexander Volkov, regarded as the father of the Uzbek avant-garde, as well as paintings by Ural Tansykbaev and the only surviving works of Vladimir Lysenko. Savitsky died in 1984; the story of his collecting was told in the 2010 documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art. A new museum building opened in 2003 and has since been extended.
Nukus itself grew from a small settlement into the capital of Karakalpakstan in 1932 and was rebuilt as a Soviet city of broad avenues; the Amu Darya flows just to its west.
Getting there
The museum is in central Nukus, the capital of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in north-western Uzbekistan. The nearest airport is Nukus International Airport (NCU), about 3 km away. The city also has a railway station.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Nukus Museum of Art, officially the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan named after I.V. Savitsky, is located in Nukus, Karakalpakstan and is home to the world's second largest collection of Russian avant-garde artworks, as well as galleries of antiquities and Karakalpak folk art. In total, there are more than 82,000 items in the museum's collection.
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