Savitsky Museum: Russian Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Memory in Nukus

Nukus is not where anyone expects to find a major collection of twentieth-century painting. The capital of Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic that fills Uzbekistan’s north-western corner, sits on the flat lands of the lower Amu Darya, a long way from Moscow, Leningrad or Tashkent. Yet the Savitsky Museum here holds tens of thousands of objects gathered by one determined man, among them thousands of paintings by artists the Soviet state had silenced. On our 29-day Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group flies to Nukus on day 20 to visit the museum before travelling on to Khiva. This article tells the story of the collection and of the memory it keeps.

Why the Savitsky Museum belongs on a Silk Road journey

Most of the Silk Road’s great sites speak of the medieval centuries: caravan cities, madrasas, mausoleums and the trade that paid for them. The Savitsky Museum adds a different layer, the twentieth century, when Central Asia was absorbed into the Soviet Union and its artists, scholars and peoples were reshaped by policies made far away. The museum is a place to think about what a culture remembers, who decides, and what it takes to keep a record when the official story says otherwise.

Its full title is the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan named after I.V. Savitsky. That long name contains the whole idea. It is a regional museum, founded to preserve Karakalpak heritage, and it is also the life’s work of a collector who used that local mission as cover for something much larger. The Art Newspaper called it the “Louvre of the steppes” in 2017, a label that doesn’t quite capture how strange and moving the collection is to walk through.

Igor Savitsky, the painter who came with the archaeologists

Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky was born in Kyiv in 1915, and his family moved to Moscow after the revolution. He trained as a painter in Moscow in the 1930s. During the Second World War, illness kept him out of military service and he was evacuated to Uzbekistan, where, according to a 2017 account in The Moscow Times, he came to know the painter Robert Falk. That meeting matters: Falk was one of the artists of the Russian avant-garde whose reputations later suffered under Soviet cultural policy, and Savitsky would go on to collect his work.

In 1950 Savitsky first came to Karakalpakstan to join the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition, the long-running Soviet survey of the ancient oasis civilisation of the lower Amu Darya led by the archaeologist Sergey Tolstov. The work took him across a landscape of ruined fortified towns, irrigation channels and desert, and introduced him to the Karakalpaks, a Turkic people of the Amu Darya delta. He later settled in Nukus, where he lived for the rest of his life and kept painting the landscape around him.

Collecting a people’s memory before the paintings

Savitsky’s first collection was not of paintings at all. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s he gathered Karakalpak jewellery, carpets, coins, clothing and household objects. Karakalpakstan’s tourism authority describes what survives today: silver-decorated saddles, carved yurt doors, relief pile-woven carpets, silver jewellery set with carnelian and turquoise, and silk-embroidered costumes, most of them dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This was urgent work. The objects belonged to a way of life that was changing fast under Soviet rule, and the skills behind them were at risk of being lost. Savitsky understood that a costume or a yurt door is a document as well as a beautiful thing: it records who made it, for which occasion, and how a family wished to be seen. Using that collection, together with finds from the archaeological work, he persuaded the authorities that the region needed a museum. It was established in 1966, with Savitsky as its first curator.

The archaeological rooms carry the story further back. According to the regional tourism authority, they hold material from ancient and medieval Khorezm from the third century BC onwards, including finds from sites such as Toprak-kala, Tok-kala and Mizdakhkan: ossuaries, terracotta figures, bronze lamps and medieval ceramics. Seen together with the folk art, they make an argument that runs through the whole museum. Karakalpakstan has a long, layered past, and it deserves to be kept and studied at home.

Rescuing forbidden art: how the avant-garde reached Nukus

The paintings came next, and they are why the Savitsky Museum is known far beyond Uzbekistan. In the decades before Savitsky began collecting, Soviet cultural policy had made socialist realism the official style. Artists who had experimented with abstraction, expressionism or the “wrong” subjects found themselves shut out of exhibitions and commissions, and many were arrested, exiled or sent to labour camps. Their work survived, if at all, in studios, attics and the homes of relatives who did not know what to do with it and were often afraid to keep it.

From the 1960s Savitsky travelled to Moscow and Leningrad to find these works. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty describes him meeting the relatives and widows of artists the authorities had banished, imprisoned or executed. The Moscow Times reports that he paid for some paintings from the museum’s small budget, received others as gifts, and sometimes left IOUs to be settled later. It was a remarkable inversion. A provincial museum, funded by the state to preserve folk heritage, was quietly acquiring art that the same state had condemned.

Distance is usually credited with helping. Nukus was remote, little visited and of small interest to the cultural officials of the capital, which gave Savitsky room to build the collection with less scrutiny than a museum in Moscow would have faced. Most of the avant-garde works he gathered were not shown during his lifetime. Savitsky died in 1984, and the museum was named after him. Wider recognition of the collection followed from the late 1980s, and it grew after Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991.

The Turkestan avant-garde: painting Central Asia from within

The Moscow and Leningrad works are only part of the picture. Savitsky also sought out the painters who had worked in Central Asia itself in the 1920s and 1930s, a group often called the Turkestan or Uzbek avant-garde. Their subjects were the bazaars, tea-houses, cotton fields and people of the region, painted in the languages of modern art rather than as ethnographic illustration.

Alexander Volkov is the central figure, and the museum is widely reported to hold around a hundred of his paintings. Alongside him are Usto Mumin, the name taken by the Russian-born painter Alexander Nikolaev, Ural Tansykbaev, Nikolai Karakhan, Viktor Ufimtsev, Mikhail Kurzin and others. The regional tourism authority lists Moscow artists including Robert Falk, Kliment Redko and Lyubov Popova, and the sculptor Vera Mukhina, among the holdings. Some artists are represented in remarkable depth: the museum holds around a thousand works by Nikolai Tarasov, by some counts more. Others are known almost entirely through Nukus. A painting called The Bull, by an artist named Lysenko about whom little is recorded, has become the museum’s emblem.

These Central Asian canvases make the collection more than a refuge for Russian art in exile. They show artists of many backgrounds trying to see the region freshly, before such experiment was closed off, and they connect the museum’s paintings to the Karakalpak costumes and jewellery downstairs. Both are records of ways of seeing and living that the twentieth century nearly erased. Our article on Soviet art in Kazakhstan follows another strand of the same story further east.

Cultural memory and the custodians who followed

After Savitsky’s death the museum passed to Marinika Babanazarova, who led it from 1984 until 2015. Over those three decades she worked to conserve the collection and to show it abroad, and the museum’s story reached a wider audience through the 2010 documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art. In 2017 the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow showed around 250 works from Nukus, an exhibition that brought some of these paintings back to the city many had left decades earlier.

The buildings have changed too. A new building was constructed in 2003, and the site has since been expanded with two additional buildings. Works from the collection have travelled to exhibitions in Europe, the United States and beyond.

What ties it all together is memory. The Karakalpak objects keep the record of a people whose way of life changed abruptly in the twentieth century. The archaeology keeps a much older Khorezm civilisation in view. The paintings keep the work of artists whom official history had tried to forget. Walking from one section to another, you sense one man’s conviction that all of these were worth saving, and that a small city on the Amu Darya was the right place to save them.

How much of the collection will you see on a visit?

Only a fraction of it. Figures for the whole collection vary by source, from more than 82,000 objects to over 100,000, and in 2019 The Art Newspaper put the avant-garde holdings at about 10,000 paintings, with around 2,000 on show. Displays change, so no single painting can be promised on a given day. A guided visit gives a good overview of the three main strands: archaeology, Karakalpak folk art and the paintings.

The Savitsky Museum on the Silk Road itinerary

On the Silk Road tour, Nukus comes on day 20, after the China and Kyrgyzstan legs and a first evening in Tashkent. The tour page describes a very early start and a flight from Tashkent to Nukus, followed by a sightseeing tour of the city with the visit to the Savitsky Art Museum, a visit to an embroidery centre and a local yurt-making family, and lunch at a local restaurant. The group then travels about four hours to Khiva for two nights. The embroidery and yurt visits make a natural companion to the museum’s folk art, showing some of the same crafts still practised today.

From Nukus the route turns towards the great oasis cities. Our guide to Khiva and its walled inner city on the Amu Darya picks up the story the following day, and the article on Bukhara’s Islamic scholarship and architecture covers the next stop. For the shape of the whole 29-day journey, from Xi’an through Gansu, Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan, see our overview of the Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent.

How long do the tours spend at the Savitsky Museum?

Part of a day on each tour, not a full day. On the Silk Road tour the museum visit falls within a city sightseeing tour on day 20, with the embroidery centre, the yurt-making family and lunch also on the programme before the journey of about four hours to Khiva. The Stans tour, by contrast, makes what its page calls a short visit to the museum on the morning of day 5, after earlier days at the Aral Sea and Muynak, before travelling on by road to Khiva, stopping en route at Toprak Kala and Ayaz Kala.

How much walking does a visit to the Savitsky Museum involve?

Expect time on your feet on hard museum floors; the collection is spread across more than one building. The Silk Road tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. The Stans tour carries its own, more demanding grading, set out on its tour page.

Is entry to the Savitsky Museum included?

Yes. The Silk Road tour includes sightseeing with English-speaking guides and all entrance fees throughout, and the Stans tour lists applicable entry fees and the services of local guides among its inclusions. Opening hours are set by the museum, so check its official information if you plan a return visit of your own. For visas, currency and other country-level matters, see our answers to common questions about Uzbekistan.

The Savitsky Museum asks something of its visitors. It is not a parade of famous names but a collection assembled against the grain, by a painter who saw that a people’s embroidery, an ancient ossuary and a banned canvas all belonged in the same story. For mature travellers following the Silk Road through Uzbekistan, it is the moment the journey turns from the medieval caravan cities to the century that nearly erased their memory, and then back again. Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers, with time to look and to talk about what you have seen, suits a place like this well.