Nukus Savitsky Museum Forbidden Soviet Art Collection
Visit the Savitsky Museum in Nukus — the remote desert city capital of the Karakalpakstan Republic that houses one of the world's most extraordinary art collections, the 40,000-piece collection assembled by Russian collector Igor Savitsky including avant-garde works banned by Stalin that he secretly moved to this obscure Central Asian city beyond the reach of Soviet censors.
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Savitsky Museum Entrance
The entrance to the Igor Savitsky State Art Museum of Karakalpakstan — the building in Nukus that houses what has been called the world's second most important collection of Russian avant-garde art after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the museum that was unknown to Western art historians until after the Soviet collapse.
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Banned Avant-Garde Gallery
The banned avant-garde gallery of the Savitsky collection — the works by artists of the Russian avant-garde movement of the 1920s-1930s including Expressionists, Cubists, and abstract artists whose work was declared degenerate by Stalin's Socialist Realism decree of 1934, the paintings that would have been destroyed had Savitsky not hidden them in this remote location.
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Savitsky Biography Room
The room dedicated to Igor Savitsky — the biography of the Russian collector who came to Karakalpakstan in the 1950s to document traditional folk art and ended up spending thirty years secretly acquiring thousands of banned artworks, the extraordinary personal story of a man who preserved a century of Russian art history at great personal risk.
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Karakalpak Folk Art Collection
The Karakalpak folk art collection within the Savitsky Museum — the traditional textiles, jewelry, and decorative arts of the Karakalpak people that were Savitsky's original collecting focus, the embroidered felt carpets (tus kiiz), the silver jewelry, and the decorated wooden objects representing the material culture of the nomadic and semi-nomadic people of the Aral Sea steppe.
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Central Asian Painting Section
The Central Asian painting section of the Savitsky collection — the works by artists who came to the region in the Soviet period to document its transformation, the paintings of the Karakalpak landscape, the Aral Sea before its destruction, and the people of the steppe that form a documentary record of a vanished world.
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Museum Garden Sculpture
The museum garden with its outdoor sculpture collection — the works displayed in the courtyard and garden of the museum building, the bronze and stone sculptures from different periods of Central Asian artistic production, the garden providing the context for understanding the full range of the Savitsky collection beyond the indoor galleries.