Page 39 - Uzbekistan rising bne IntelliNews special report

bne December 2021 Special Report: Uzbekistan Rising I 39
Savitsky museum, the Louvre of the Steppe
he 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 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.
Ben Aris in Nukus
T
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 completely collapsed. The region's
firms had no money and were paying workers with sacks of pasta so they at least had something to eat. Decades of over-irrigation of the surrounding cotton fields meant the water table had risen to the surface and the foundations of all the buildings in the small city were rotting in the stagnant water. Babanazarova was doing what she could to preserve the paintings and protect them from damage. But in the last five years the museum has become increasingly famous and more and more travellers are going out of their way to visit the collection.
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