Homage to Savitsky: Collecting 20th-Century Russian and Uzbek Art

Unnoticed by the international art world until recently, the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art — located in Nukus, Uzbekistan — houses the second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world (after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg). This extraordinary museum is the life's work of Igor Vitalievich Savitsky, a Russian painter born in Kiev who first visited Karakalpakstan in 1950 as a member of the famous Khorezm Archeological & Ethnographic Expedition led by Sergei Tolstov. Subsequently, having moved from Moscow to Nukus, Savitsky began collecting the works of the Russian avant-garde — including those by such well-known names as Falk, Mukhina, Koudriachov, Popova, and Redko — whose paintings were banned during Stalin's rule and through the 1960s because they did not conform to the officially prescribed Soviet 'socialist realism' school of art. The current English language publication, already issued in Russian in 2011, helps make the Savitsky Collection accessible to a broad international audience for the first time.