About Uzbekistan

The highlight of Nukus is the recently relocated Igor Savitsky Museum  (127 Rzaev; 222 2526; museum_savitsky@mail.ru; www.savitskycollection.org;  09.00-13.00 & 14.00-17.00 Mon-Fri, 10.00-16.00 Sat-Sun; foreign adult/student 10,000/7,000 som, guided tour 5,000/4,000 som), home to one of the finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art from the 1920s and 30s; an age of relative artistic freedom before the demands from the 'centre' changed in the mid-1930s and Stalinist socialist realism became the only acceptable form of Soviet art. Nukus's backwater obscurity enabled Savitsky to collect a wide spread of artistic life, from local folk art to Russian icons, at a time when the more celebrated museums in Moscow and St Petersburg had their wrists ideologically tied.

Like a ruby in the dust, the Igor Savitsky Museum (also known simply as Nukus Museum) holds the worlds second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde paintings after the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It also has one of the largest exhibitions of archaeological finds and folk art anywhere in central Asia. Today the museum holds some 80,000 exhibits ranging from the Khorezmian art of Toprak Kala to Karakalpak cubism.

The museum is divided into five galleries. Uzbek Art of the 1920s and 1930s is a comprehensive survey of schools from realism to avant-garde, and the gallery includes the work of both Uzbek artists and foreign artists painting in Uzbekistan. The works show the important interplay of influences from East and West: architecture and decorative arts are drawn from Uzbekistan's Islamic traditions; artists such as Benkov, Koravay and Kashina depict the region's ancient cities; Nikolayev imaginatively blends the techniques of Italian masters and Russian iconography. There are also works of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Futurism.

The most famous gallery is 20th century Russian Avant-Garde, a smorgasbord of post-revolutionary works that narrowly survived Stalin's curtailment of creative freedom and prescription of 'Social Realism' as the only acceptable form of Soviet art in 1932. Art that did not conform with Stalin's ideal was repressed and its artists persecuted.

Savitsky acquired works by persecuted artists (including M Sokolov, the murdered V Komarovskiy, and the Amaraveila group) and also paintings by then unknown artists. The works of artists such as R Mazel, P Sokolov, A Sofronova, E Ermilova-Platova and K Red'ko were not recognised, let alone appreciated, by anyone else until the late 1960s.