During the height of Soviet ambition, Moscow hatched a plan to transform Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, into a cotton field that would clothe the entire USSR. The ill-conceived idea didn’t work, and it also drained Karakalpakstan’s Aral Sea by diverting all of the rivers that fed it for irrigation, reducing what was once the world’s fourth largest lake to a tenth of its former size. It’s wholly appropriate, then, that today, a building in Karakalpakstan’s small capital, Nukus, houses a vast reservoir of cultural artifacts that Moscow also attempted to drain.
The Nukus Museum’s collection is an exception to the hydrology of culture, whereby cultural heritage artifacts flow through the channels carved out by wealth and power. The British Museum is home to the most important sculptures from the Parthenon of Athens. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica lived most of its life in New York’s MoMA at the painter’s request, returning to Spain only in 1992. But the most important collection of Soviet-era paintings is in Karakalpakstan. Still, the story of how the Nukus Museum came to exist tells more about the influence that those with wealth and power hold over what we canonize in the first place than who buys what’s already considered important. For the Soviet regime under Stalin, art was a one-party system called Soviet realism, a Normal Rockwell-esque style that was visually realist and thematically idealist. And also really dull. If you didn’t paint scenes of happy soviets enjoying manual labor under the benevolent, paternalistic gaze of Stalin, you weren’t considered an artist. Or much else: painters who deviated from the norm, either thematically or formally, were sent to gulags, locked up, or simply denied work. Their artwork was similarly destroyed or imprisoned.
Under the circumstances, it’s not so surprising that somebody created a safehouse for imperiled artworks. But it’s fascinating just how well Nukus Museum’s founder, the failed Russian artist Igor Savitsky, pulled it off. After deciding to permanently settle in Karakalpakstan after he traveled there as the artist for an archeological expedition, Savitsky began to amass a collection of the region’s traditional clothing, blankets, and jewelry — items of ethnic identity that were discouraged under Stalin. Eventually, the penniless Savitsky’s collection grew — through illegal funding he finagled from the Soviet government itself — to include painting from the then-contemporary Russian avant-garde (some banned works were even “bought” from the warehouses they were locked up in) and, even more impressively, works from a previously-unknown group of Russians who settled in Uzbekistan immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The latter group spectacularly combined European modernism with local Islamic influences, like Gauguin far from the tropics, complete with his exoticization of non-Western culture.
Besides the artworks themselves, there’s little that’s visually interesting in the film’s assemblage of old photographs; interviews with the museum’s staff, the artists’ children, and former Soviet officials; and archival footage of stuff. And the most gorgeous and weird of the film’s protagonists, the city of Nukus itself, is barely featured at all, despite repeated emphasis on just how incredible it is for such a treasure to be located there and how, because of the area’s poverty, climate, and Islamic extremism, the art is now once again in danger. It’s a disappointing omission that’s consistent with filmmakers Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev’s general lack of interest in Karakalpakstan, or at least in letting it speak for itself. The Karakalpaks interviewed in the film are there mainly to fill us in on Savitsky’s expatriate experience. What we do learn about the region comes from the United States’ Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief for Uzbekistan, which he describes as a “backwards” place. In one particularly bizarre claim, he asserts that the “abstract” character of most of the art makes it a prime target for Islamic terrorists; weird since, if anything, Islam favors the abstract over representation in art.
Still, writers and directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev competently explain how, on the edges of the USSR’s empire, Savitsky collected over 40,000 artworks that would have otherwise been destroyed or forgotten and the history — both personal and national — that led him to do so. Like Savitsky himself, Pope and Georgiev are better curators than artists. Considering those thousands of canvasses, there’s value in that. I just wish the directors had emulated Savitsky’s fondness for Karakalpakstan as much as his love of art.
