Page 58 - bnemagazine bne_December 2021_20211203.pdf

58 I Eurasia bne December 2021
Savitsky museum,
the Louvre of the Steppe
Ben Aris in Nukus
The small town of Nukus in the wastes of Uzbekistan’s Qizilqum (aka Kzyl-Kum) desert is the “Louvre of the Steppe.” The new building, put up in 2017, houses
an Aladdin’s cave of lost Russian impressionist art, an entire generation's worth that was rescued by art enthusiast Igor Savitsky. It is probably the second-biggest collection of avant- garde art in the world collected in the 30s after Stalin had most of an entire generation of impressionist artists repressed or executed.
Savitsky was born in the Ukraine
in 1915 to a well-to-do family but eventually ended up running an archaeological project in Nukus. Stalin didn't like the new impressionist style that was being developed in France and leaked into Russia where a whole school of painters embraced it, turning out their own interpretations. In 1932
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the Kremlin officially ruled that only the social realism style was acceptable and most of the Russian artists simply stopped displaying their work, while many were arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda.
Savitsky began travelling to Moscow and St Petersburg and bought up
entire collections, or was sometimes gifted them by relatives hoping to save the paintings from destruction. In all Savitsky assembled a collection of
over 80,000 canvases, many of them masterpieces, and opened the Savitsky Museum in a few rooms of Nukus’ natural history museum in 1966, where they hung as many of the best pieces from ceiling to floor. At the same time, Savitsky collected the work of local artists and is credited with being the father of a whole school of Central Asian painting, which is also on display in the Nukus museum.
Old building
The Uzbek authorities took a long time to realise the treasure trove that was sitting in a run-down old building in the remote western town that is the capital of the Karakalpakstan region.
I first visited the museum when I was correspondent to Uzbekistan and met
the curator Marinika Babanazarova, the daughter of Savitsky’s friend who helped him open the museum. Even the new building only has room to exhibit about 3% of the entire collection, so the paintings are rotated regularly, but rarely leave Nukus. However, in 1999 they were stacked
in wooden racks along the walls and on the floors. You could flick through the canvases. For closer inspection you could pick out picture and hang it on a large nail in the wall in front of a bare light bulb.
At the time Nukus was an ecological disaster and the local economy had