SUMMARY:

This article serves as an introduction to the publication of archival documents related to the first two decades of existence of the Nukus Museum of Art. Situated amid a desert, Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpak autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR, became home to the art collection that is said to be the second largest collection of Russian modernist art in the world today. The museum was created in 1966 on the initiative of Igor Savitsky – an artist and art collector, who moved from Moscow to Uzbekistan after World War II. The figure of Savitsky and the history of the museum that bears his name today are surrounded by myths, because of both the uniqueness of the collection of Russian avant-garde art procured by a Soviet state museum and the scarcity of information about this initiative that was hitherto available to scholars. How was it possible for a private individual to create a new state museum, why did Karakalpak applied folk art and works of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde become part of a single museum collection, and how did Moscow-based modernist paintings end up in Central Asia? These are some of the questions addressed in this article. As a first step toward the proper analysis of Savitsky’s story as substantiated by historical documents, this introduction to their publication draws a map of the available sources. It also identifies additional contexts and stories in need of further research.
The author argues that Savitsky’s personal story as a creator of the Nukus museum intersects with the story of the postwar Soviet state and society. This reveals the competitions of multiple actors within the Soviet space for cultural (symbolic), financial, and economic capital. It problematizes the very notion of postwar Sovietness, which emerges as hybrid and multivalent. Reconstructed on the basis of archival documents from several repositories, the story of Savitsky and his museum presents various actors partaking simultaneously in several social milieus and negotiating their different but seemingly equally “Soviet” visions on multiple levels, from Union republics to autonomous republics to local society.