Tansykbaev—the most famous representative of this school—was initially attracted to Fauvism and Expressionism, but later turned to Socialist Realism and became a member of the Soviet Academy of Arts. However, it was his earlier works that interested Savitsky, and these are the ones on display at the exhibition at the Pushkin Museum.
The exhibit also includes “The Bull,” a painting by the mysterious Yevgeny Lysenko. Little is known about the painter or his fate, and only a few works have survived to this day. “The Bull” has become the unofficial symbol of the Nukus Museum.
But Savitsky’s gift to the art world was not just Turkestan avant-garde. During the 1960s, the curator also started traveling to Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) to collect paintings from his artist friends whose works had been deemed “degenerate” by the Soviet authorities. Some of these paintings he bought with the Nukus Museum’s small budget. Others he got as gifts. In some cases, he left IOUs to be paid later.
The collection in Nukus grew ever larger as it acquired “unwanted” paintings that would probably never have survived other- wise. For instance, the museum came to pos- sess about 1,200 paintings by Nikolai Tarasov, a little-known artist who was a graduate of Vkhutemas, a 1920s center of avant-garde art.
Among the items on display in Moscow are also works by Lyubov Popova, probably the best-known female artist of the Russian avant-garde, as well as more obscure painters like Alisa Poret and Boris Rybchenkov. Some of the unique finds of the Chorasmia expedition are also on view, including ossuaries and items linked with Zoroastrian (pre-Islamic Persian) religious practices.
Unfortunately, Savitsky did not live to see his collection come to global prominence: He died in 1984. Chudetskaya explains that one of the aims of the current exhibit is “to pay tribute” to Savitsky.
“What we see here,” she says, “is an individual project: the creation of a cultural center in a region that was not particularly suited for such an undertaking.””
‘The Treasures of Nukus’ runs through May 10.
