Page 40 - Uzbekistan rising bne IntelliNews special report

40 I Special Report: Uzbekistan Rising bne December 2021
The most famous painting in the Nukus collection is “The Bull” by the Belarusian artist Vladimir Lysenko, originally called “Fascists Approach." Soviet censors deemed it anti-Soviet and interned the artist in a mental asylum for 15 years, from which he eventually emerged paralysed and very ill.
Just before he died in 1984 he told Babanazarova: “I created the museum too soon. But one day people from Paris will come to Nukus.”
Babanazarova said: “Savitsky always said people would come from Paris to see it, and now the French are our number one visitors.” In 2008 President Chirac was one of those admirers of part of the collection at a rare foreign show in Paris.
Savitsky’s career
Growing up in Ukraine in the twilight days of the Russian empire, Savitsky’s grandfather was a well-known member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. As a child, Savitsky received an excellent education, travelled abroad and spoke fluent French. Having decided to become an artist, Savitsky entered the Surikov Institute in Moscow but couldn’t find work after graduating.
When World War II erupted, Savitsky was evacuated to Uzbekistan (he was unfit to serve due to an illness). During this period he befriended prominent Russian artists Robert Falk and Konstantin Istomin, who had also been evacuated to the region.
Savitsky trained and worked as an archaeologist in Central Asia, but was
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also a painter and passionate art lover. He began to collect the art of locals and encouraged them by giving lessons to young artists, including some of the more prominent Uzbek artists of the period.
When a chance to work as an artist
at the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition in the Kyzl- Kum desert came up, he took it. The expedition made significant discoveries in local history, while Savitsky developed a deep attachment for the Karakalpakstan region, which featured heavily in his own art.
Savitsky started collecting ethnographic objects from local villages: carpets, costumes, folk art. Soon local authorities noticed his efforts and made him the head of the museum in Nukus in 1966.
After the museum was established Savitsky paid more attention to the paintings being produced by local artists, many of which are on exhibition in Nukus today. This
led to Savitsky’s discovery of Alexander Volkov, Ural Tansykbaev, Viktor Ufimtsev and others, whose style is now dubbed “Turkestan avant-garde” and amongst the most famous of the local artists.
Tansykbaev – the most famous of all
– was initially attracted to Fauvism
and Expressionism, but later turned to Socialist Realism as the political climate changed, and he became a member of the Soviet Academy of Arts.
The Nukus art museum was the first dedicated to Central Asian art where he displayed his collection in a few rooms in the old history museum in Nukus, the same building that Babanazarova occupied when I met her.
Russian impressionism
The artistic movement which emerged in Russia around 1890 unfolded through the extensive flow of art and artists between Paris and Moscow, which were culturally joined at the hip in Tsarist Russia. However, following the October Revolution in 1917 the ties with France were broken and art became the preserve of the state.
Stalin cracked down on the new school and constrained art to populist, realist
and easily understandable iterations via Socialist Realism. Art took on a propaganda role that impinged on its style and narrowed the interpretations an artist could make. The State fought an escalating campaign to completely eradicate the genre of true art until Stalin’s death in 1953. Savitsky played a major role in preserving that entire generation of Soviet art.
Russia was rocked by Stalin’s terror in the early 30s. In 1932 the Soviet government decreed that artists had to follow the social realism school, but this was the heyday of impressionism and a Russian school had embraced the new ideas.
The painters soon got into trouble. Some were arrested. Others didn't show their work for fear of retribution. And many simply ran out of money.
Savitsky started to travel up to Moscow and St Petersburg to rescue the works of these artists and take them back to the relative safety of his museum in Nukus. Under the noses of the Soviet censors Savitsky amassed a collection that encompassed the works of almost an entire generation of artists.
He disguised thousands of priceless paintings as simple luggage and packed them off to Uzbekistan. He loaded them onto trains and trucks assigned to a non-existent archaeological expedition, which whisked them off
to safety in the far flung desert town that was his home.
Art collector Igor Savitsky.