Uzbekistan: Nukus Contemporary Art Museum Survives amid Hardship

Lost in the rough of present-day economic hardship and environmental degradation, Uzbekistan's state art museum in Nukus is a little-known treasure that houses a trove of the Soviet era's unacknowledged cultural heritage. The museum, which contains perhaps the best collection of Russian avant-garde art outside of Moscow, recently celebrated 25 years since the death of its remarkable founder.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Igor Savitsky traveled across the Soviet Union, seeking out the art of blacklisted, imprisoned and forgotten artists who created works in officially discouraged styles. He ended up amassing more than 90,000 pieces that, taken collectively, now stand as a monument to the irrepressible nature of human creativity. Soviet Communism attempted to reengineer the mind: Savitsky's collection proved that the Soviet experiment could not succeed.

"He had no rivals. No one else was going around to the families of the artists trying to acquire these works -- many were given to him -- because there was no official interest," says John Bowlt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California.

Igor Vitalievitch Savitsky was born to an intellectual family in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1915. After the family moved to Moscow in the 1920s, Savitsky studied with several artists while apprenticing as an electrical fitter at the Hammer and Sickle factory. Because of health concerns, he was not drafted into service in World War II, and instead he entered the Surikov Art Institute in 1941.

In 1942, the Surikov Institute evacuated to Samarkand, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Despite the hardships of wartime, Savitsky immediately took to life there. He discovered a community of artists already working in Samarkand, many of whom reveled in their distance from the official Soviet art establishment in Moscow.

In 1950, Savitsky accepted an invitation to serve as the official artist on an archeological expedition deep in the desert of Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic in the Uzbek Republic's far northwest of which Nukus is the capital.

Savitsky traveled across Karakalpakstan for the next seven years, gathering ethnographic objects for delivery to museums in Moscow and Leningrad. Later on, this experience would prove useful, as, amid his efforts to gather avant-garde works, he collected unique handicrafts of the nomadic Karakalpaks, aiming to preserve a record of their dying culture.

In the late 1950s, following the completion of the archeological expedition, Savitsky settled in Nukus, where he taught young artists about the visual arts and painting. To offer examples, he started to pull together pieces by Central Asian artists. Soon he was traveling across the vast breadth of the Soviet Union on the hunt for artists' works.

He quickly widened his search to include pieces by disgraced and blacklisted artists, many of whom had perished. He filled train compartments with pieces of art that held no interest to the official art establishment.

Because Karakalpakstan was a center for the Soviet military's research and testing of biological weapons, it was a closed area, meaning non-residents could not visit. Karakalpakstan's isolation and desert environment thus worked to Savitsky's advantage, as it kept watchful eyes away.

"By being on the periphery, he was able to escape possible punishment or even imprisonment for his unusual behavior, and it was to his advantage to be away from the axis of power in Moscow," says Bowlt.

Local officials adopted a hands-off attitude toward him. By 1966, Savitsky had received permission from local officials to open the Nukus Fine Arts Museum on the second floor of an Academy of Science building. He covered the walls there with paintings and drawings and filled the corners with sculpture.

Many of these works are by lesser-known artists working outside the cultural circles of Moscow and Leningrad who would have been long forgotten had Savitsky not preserved their works. "Many names are unfamiliar to this day, and we should be grateful to Savitsky for putting together these unusual canvases by these unusual artists," notes Bowlt. "It's interesting to see how Cubism or Constructivism was interpreted in the far-flung regions of the Soviet empire. Local, indigenous artists often synthesized Western trends with their local, often folkloristic motifs."

Savitsky was intermittently ordered to stop collecting. Usually, he pretended to obey, but he continued using backdoor methods. Slowly, he earned notoriety among the small group of Soviet art officials and connoisseurs in Moscow, eventually finding an important benefactor in the Soviet Minister of Culture.

Savitsky's frantic collecting created a desperate need for more space, and he eventually won approval for a new museum building. Construction began in 1971, continued in fits and starts through the decade, but stalled by the late 1970s. For more than 20 years, the half-built structure collected dust.

Through it all, he lived as an ascetic, eating little and sleeping only a few hours a night. Anonymous letters denounced him, and vast collecting debts mounted. His health deteriorated. Thin, frail, spurning medication, Savitsky died in Moscow on July 27, 1984.

Before Savitsky died, he entrusted the museum directorship to 29-year-old Marinika Babanazarova. This year also marks her 25th year as the steward of the Savitsky of the museum.

After Uzbekistan declared independence in 1991 and Karakalpakstan lost its status as a "closed" region, a stream of diplomats and other foreign art lovers traveled to Nukus. From this group of mostly Western enthusiasts sprang Uzbekistan's first-ever museum support group, the "Friends of Nukus Museum."

These days, Nukus has little that recommends itself. The nearby Aral Sea continues to shrink, spreading heath risks and economic misery. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The Savitsky Museum is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak local landscape.

The friends' group pushed for the completion of the new museum, which opened in 2003 and bears its founders name: the I.V. Savitsky State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan.

From the government the museum receives only money for staff salaries. The museum must pay for security and restoration efforts itself. As Savitsky instructed that no piece of the collection could be sold, the museum cannot raise funds by selling any of its art, although many collectors and Western museums have put pressure on Babanazarova to do so.

The museum does receive limited support. The Friends of the Nukus Museum works to broadcast the museum's unique contents and history. Some restoration efforts have been underwritten by Restaurateurs Sans Frontieres and funding from the German Embassy, as well as the Friends group and private donors.

Coming up in October, Babanazarova intends to publish a memoir in London that she has written about Savitsky and his collection.