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<\/p>\nIn a corner of Uzbekistan, close to the cracked, muddy crater that was once the Aral Sea, lies an unlikely treasure trove. The I.V. Savitsky State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan (as the museum is formally designated), in the city of Nukus, holds close to 100,000 works of art from the middle decades of the 20th century: canvases, etchings and naturalistic sketches of rural life alongside folk art and textiles from a region whose vast, unbounded expanses were crossed for a thousand years by the caravans, travellers and thieves of the ancient Silk Road.<\/p>\n
This year, Nukus Museum has received more attention than ever before, both at home and abroad. Following the exhibition of its collection in Florence and Venice in 2024, the museum has been completely overhauled by Italian academics and its new director, Gulbahar Izentaeva, who was appointed at the beginning of the year. It is now \u201ccentral Asia\u2019s most important and up-to-date museum of 20th-century art\u201d, according to Silvia Burini, a professor of art history at the Ca\u2019 Foscari University of Venice, who has been working on the collection for the past four years.<\/p>\n
The renovation is part of a major effort by the Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), a powerful Uzbek government-backed body that promotes the country\u2019s cultural heritage to an international audience. Other recent ACDF initiatives include the inaugural Bukhara Biennial in September and a partnership with the Art Basel fair in Paris in October.<\/p>\n
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Nukus Museum has welcomed almost 70,000 visitors so far this year Courtesy of Iwan Baan and ACDF, all rights reserved<\/p>\n
Celebrating the Avanguardia Orientalis<\/p>\n
In 2021, the ACDF approached Venetian art historians to curate an exhibition from the Nukus collection at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Burini and her colleagues began to pay serious academic attention to an institution with a body of work so vast that few have charted its significance. After closing in Italy, the exhibitions travelled back to Nukus, where they were put on display across three floors of the museum last spring.<\/p>\n
The exhibition space has been renovated by the Italian architect Massimiliano Bigarello. With its new layout, flooring and lighting, it offers \u201ca completely new atmosphere\u201d, Burini says. A new exhibition she curated at Nukus, The World of Igor Savitsky, tells the story of how the museum came into being.<\/p>\n
The current exhibitions are just the beginning of a much larger plan for the academic study of Uzbekistan\u2019s Modern art heritage, Burini explains. \u201cWe have to study the different localised micro schools of painting that arose in Bukhara and Tajikistan and Nukus. But that will require doing fieldwork with the old artists who are still alive.\u201d Burini and her colleagues have dubbed these schools the Avanguardia Orientalis in the book\u00a0Uzbekistan in Paintings: 20th-Century Avant-Garde, which is due to be published next March.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe defining word for us is dialogue,\u201d Burini says. \u201cThe influences came from Turkestan to Russia and back again\u2014and there were European and Caucasian influences too, and much more besides.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group of works on show are striking, playful and varied, and have complex, layered origins, including the Russian avant-garde, in which figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich responded to global movements such as Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism in the febrile social and political context of early 20th-century Russia.<\/p>\n
But Burini argues that the art which emerged from central Asia was not just a \u201cmarginal or folkloric offshoot of previous Russian developments\u2014it\u2019s something deeper\u201d. She says it is also rooted in indigenous visual traditions: the inscrutable waves of colour on ikats woven in the monochrome plains of central Asia, stippled walls of glassy turquoise tiles on the soaring heights of Samarkand\u2019s monumental Islamic architecture, and flowering vines painstakingly embroidered on suzanis at Shahrizabz.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of the artists working in central Asia [in the 1920s and 30s] were not native to there,\u201d Burini says. \u201cIn the 20s and 30s, they wanted to find new sources of beauty and make something new\u2014like how Picasso looked at African masks.\u201d<\/p>\n
The art-loving Soviet bureaucrat<\/p>\n
The museum was founded by Savitsky, an art-loving Soviet bureaucrat who made his life in the remote region of Karakalpakstan and compulsively collected Modern and unusual art from Russia and central Asia. It was a risky business\u2014in the Soviet Union, only Socialist Realism received official sanction\u2014but under the cover of preserving local craft traditions, Savitsky was able to amass an important body of work from the fertile, hopeful years that followed the October Revolution of 1917.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are very lucky to have Savitsky,\u201d Izentaeva says, \u201cbecause he not only saved forbidden art, he also saved local folk art.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the museum became an important, if fragile, symbol of what had been preserved through the ravages of authoritarianism. At the museum, as the historian Svetlana Gorshenina recalls, the collapse \u201cled to a financial crisis but also freedom\u201d. In the 1990s, an international organisation called the Friends of the Nukus Museum raised funds and awareness.<\/p>\n
In the 2010s, Gorshenina co-founded the Alerte H\u00e9ritage organisation to \u201cshow that it was possible to catalogue the collection in public without huge expense, which would make it much harder for these works to be sold abroad\u201d. The ACDF has now hired a private company to take over the digitisation effort at Nukus. According to Izentaeva, 3,000 works have so far been catalogued.<\/p>\n
Izentaeva attributes the museum\u2019s recent revival to the ACDF. \u201cThey don\u2019t give money directly to the museum but they pay for specialists and restorers to come to Nukus \u2026 and funded the renovation of the new premises,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n
The ACDF is run by Uzbekistan\u2019s culture tsar Gayane Umerova, who is a senior member of the country\u2019s presidential administration and commissioner for the Bukhara Biennial. She describes the ACDF\u2019s mandate to \u201crevitalise heritage\u201d as being \u201cjust one step in a national cultural renaissance led by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and supported by Saida Mirziyoyeva\u201d. Mirziyoyeva is a politician, head of the presidential administration and the president\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n