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Nukus is a small city, capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, south of what was once the Aral Sea. An apparently anonymous destination, which instead reserves a surprise: one of the most important collections in the world dedicated to the Russian artistic avant-garde. The Desert Louvre, as it has been called, or the IV Savitsky Museum, has a fictional history.
Tashkent
While the location can now be reached with a comfortable flight from the capital Tashkent, at the time of the Soviet occupation it was remote to say the least. At the end of the 1940s, an artist catapulted to Uzbekistan in 1942 had arrived there as a designer for an archaeological expedition. Igor Vital’evich Savitsky (1915-1984) had found himself in Samarkand, following the IV Surikov Art Institute, evacuated from Moscow due to World War II.
After the years of a youth marked by family tragedies, under the Soviet regime, the boundless and desert landscapes of Karakalpakstan – or Khorezem – become the theater of his new life. Having gained the sympathy of Marat Nurmukhavedov, of the Nukus Academy of Sciences, he was hired as a researcher, put together an impressive collection of ethnographic art from the region and thus earned the trust of the authorities. In 1966 he inaugurated the first nucleus of the museum, of which he was appointed director and which became his life’s mission.
The wonders of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus
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The distance from the center of power and the tolerance of the local intelligentsia allow him to remain close to his world of origin and to save works – mostly from the 1920s and 1930s relating to the complex world of pre- and post October revolution – at risk because not in the wake of Socialist Realism, which became the official art of the Soviet Union. The director does not hold back even in the face of the most daring operations to bring to Nukus paintings, sculptures and drawings by artists often deported to the gulags.
More than 80 thousand exhibits are preserved in the collection, of which about eight thousand are works by Russian, Uzbek and Turkmen artists, plus drawings and paintings by Savitsky himself. Precious film clips show him to us: thin, almost ascetic, with a high-pitched voice. After his passing, his work was continued by the director Marinika Babanazarova until 2015 (in 2003 the museum was expanded with two more buildings) and by the current director, Tigran Mkrtycher.