UZBEKISTAN: NUKUS CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM SURVIVES AMID HARDSHIP
Eurasia Insight
ticles/eav091409c.shtml
9/14/09
Lost in the rough of present-day economic hardship and environmental
degradation, Uzbekistan’s state art museum in Nukus is a little-known
treasure that houses a trove of the Soviet era’s unacknowledged
cultural heritage. The museum, which contains perhaps the best
collection of Russian avant-garde art outside of Moscow, recently
celebrated 25 years since the death of its remarkable founder.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Igor Savitsky traveled across the Soviet
Union, seeking out the art of blacklisted, imprisoned and forgotten
artists who created works in officially discouraged styles. He ended up
amassing more than 90,000 pieces that, taken collectively, now stand
as a monument to the irrepressible nature of human creativity. Soviet
Communism attempted to reengineer the mind: Savitsky’s collection
proved that the Soviet experiment could not succeed.
"He had no rivals. No one else was going around to the families of
the artists trying to acquire these works — many were given to
him — because there was no official interest," says John Bowlt,
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
Southern California.
Igor Vitalievitch Savitsky was born to an intellectual family in
Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1915. After the family moved to Moscow in the
1920s, Savitsky studied with several artists while apprenticing as
an electrical fitter at the Hammer and Sickle factory. Because of
health concerns, he was not drafted into service in World War II,
and instead he entered the Surikov Art Institute in 1941.
In 1942, the Surikov Institute evacuated to Samarkand, in the Uzbek
Soviet Socialist Republic. Despite the hardships of wartime, Savitsky
immediately took to life there. He discovered a community of artists
already working in Samarkand, many of whom reveled in their distance
from the official Soviet art establishment in Moscow.
In 1950, Savitsky accepted an invitation to serve as the official
artist on an archeological expedition deep in the desert of
Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic in the Uzbek Republic’s far
northwest of which Nukus is the capital.
Savitsky traveled across Karakalpakstan for the next seven years,
gathering ethnographic objects for delivery to museums in Moscow
and Leningrad. Later on, this experience would prove useful, as,
amid his efforts to gather avant-garde works, he collected unique
handicrafts of the nomadic Karakalpaks, aiming to preserve a record
of their dying culture.
In the late 1950s, following the completion of the archeological
expedition, Savitsky settled in Nukus, where he taught young artists
about the visual arts and painting. To offer examples, he started to
pull together pieces by Central Asian artists. Soon he was traveling
across the vast breadth of the Soviet Union on the hunt for artists’
works.
He quickly widened his search to include pieces by disgraced and
blacklisted artists, many of whom had perished. He filled train
compartments with pieces of art that held no interest to the official
art establishment.
Because Karakalpakstan was a center for the Soviet military’s
research and testing of biological weapons, it was a closed area,
meaning non-residents could not visit. Karakalpakstan’s isolation
and desert environment thus worked to Savitsky’s advantage, as it
kept watchful eyes away.
"By being on the periphery, he was able to escape possible punishment
or even imprisonment for his unusual behavior, and it was to his
advantage to be away from the axis of power in Moscow," says Bowlt.
Local officials adopted a hands-off attitude toward him. By 1966,
Savitsky had received permission from local officials to open the
Nukus Fine Arts Museum on the second floor of an Academy of Science
building. He covered the walls there with paintings and drawings and
filled the corners with sculpture.
Many of these works are by lesser-known artists working outside the
cultural circles of Moscow and Leningrad who would have been long
forgotten had Savitsky not preserved their works. "Many names are
unfamiliar to this day, and we should be grateful to Savitsky for
putting together these unusual canvases by these unusual artists,"
notes Bowlt. "It’s interesting to see how Cubism or Constructivism
was interpreted in the far-flung regions of the Soviet empire. Local,
indigenous artists often synthesized Western trends with their local,
often folkloristic motifs."
Savitsky was intermittently ordered to stop collecting. Usually, he
pretended to obey, but he continued using backdoor methods. Slowly,
he earned notoriety among the small group of Soviet art officials and
connoisseurs in Moscow, eventually finding an important benefactor
in the Soviet Minister of Culture.
Savitsky’s frantic collecting created a desperate need for more space,
and he eventually won approval for a new museum building. Construction
began in 1971, continued in fits and starts through the decade, but
stalled by the late 1970s. For more than 20 years, the half-built
structure collected dust.
Through it all, he lived as an ascetic, eating little and sleeping
only a few hours a night. Anonymous letters denounced him, and vast
collecting debts mounted. His health deteriorated. Thin, frail,
spurning medication, Savitsky died in Moscow on July 27, 1984.
Before Savitsky died, he entrusted the museum directorship to
29-year-old Marinika Babanazarova. This year also marks her 25th year
as the steward of the Savitsky of the museum.
After Uzbekistan declared independence in 1991 and Karakalpakstan
lost its status as a "closed" region, a stream of diplomats and other
foreign art lovers traveled to Nukus. From this group of mostly Western
enthusiasts sprang Uzbekistan’s first-ever museum support group, the
"Friends of Nukus Museum."
These days, Nukus has little that recommends itself. The nearby
Aral Sea continues to shrink, spreading heath risks and economic
misery. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The Savitsky
Museum is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak local
landscape.
The friends’ group pushed for the completion of the new museum, which
opened in 2003 and bears its founders name: the I.V. Savitsky State
Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan.
>From the government the museum receives only money for staff
salaries. The museum must pay for security and restoration efforts
itself. As Savitsky instructed that no piece of the collection could
be sold, the museum cannot raise funds by selling any of its art,
although many collectors and Western museums have put pressure on
Babanazarova to do so.
The museum does receive limited support. The Friends of the
Nukus Museum works to broadcast the museum’s unique contents
and history. Some restoration efforts have been underwritten by
Restaurateurs Sans Frontieres and funding from the German Embassy,
as well as the Friends group and private donors.
Coming up in October, Babanazarova intends to publish a memoir in
London that she has written about Savitsky and his collection.