The world's most remote museum — Soviet avant-garde art in the Karakalpak steppe
Nukus is the capital of the autonomous Karakalpakstan region in western Uzbekistan — a flat, dusty steppe city near the shrinking Aral Sea whose only claim to world attention is one of the most remarkable museums on earth. The Savitsky State Art Museum of Karakalpakstan holds over 90,000 works, including the world's second-largest collection of Soviet avant-garde art (after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg): paintings, sculptures, and applied art that Stalin banned as 'degenerate formalism' and which the museum's founder, Russian artist Igor Savitsky, spent decades smuggling away from des…
The Karakalpak people inhabited the delta of the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus River) for millennia, developing a nomadic and semi-nomadic culture distinct from their Uzbek neighbours. Russian conquest came in 1873; Soviet collectivization destroyed much of the traditional economy in the 1920s–30s. Igor Savitsky arrived as an archaeologist in 1950 and began collecting both Karakalpak folk art and Russian avant-garde works whose owners faced persecution — by the time of his death in 1984 he had assembled one of the greatest art collections in Central Asia in an entirely inaccessible city where i…