SUMMARY:

Russian modernist artist Alexander Nikolaev (1897–1957), who studied with Kazemir Malevich, fell in love with Central Asia when he came to Samarkand for the first time in 1920. He decided to settle there and “go native” by converting to Islam and taking the new name by which he is remembered today: Usto Mumin. The article traces the history of perception, adaptation, and interpretation of Usto Mumin’s art in the course of the transformation of Central Asia’s culture in Uzbekistan. It starts with the circle of artists who migrated to the region in the early 1920s, whose art has been incorporated into the Soviet and post-Soviet canon of the “Uzbek national school of painting.” The article revisits the interpretations of art critics and the responses of subsequent Uzbek artists to Usto Mumin’s style and imageries. The influence of Usto Mumin on the Uzbek national artistic canon had already become noticeable in the 1940s; in the 1990s, after Uzbekistan gained independence, this influence acquired a central role in defining the style and narrative of Uzbek national distinctiveness in art.