Nukus
— — the desert town that hid the paintings.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Karakalpakstan, in western Uzbekistan, on the lower Amu Darya. The Savitsky Museum here holds the second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world — around 90,000 pieces — gathered by Igor Savitsky through the 1960s and 1970s while the same work was being suppressed in Moscow. The Aral Sea once reached within 150 kilometres to the north. The Kyzylkum desert begins at the edge of the city.
Nukus, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nukus is the capital of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region within western Uzbekistan, with a population of roughly 330,000. The city sits on the lower Amu Darya about 200 kilometres south of what was the southern shore of the Aral Sea. The Kyzylkum desert begins at the eastern edge of the city; the Ustyurt plateau rises to the west. Karakalpak is a Turkic language closer to Kazakh than to Uzbek, and the republic has its own parliament and flag inside the Uzbek federation.
Igor Savitsky was a Russian-born painter and archaeologist who moved to Karakalpakstan in 1950 with an ethnographic expedition and stayed. He founded the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art in 1966 and over the next eighteen years acquired some 90,000 pieces, including thousands of Soviet avant-garde works that Moscow had condemned as formalist. Many of the artists were dead or in the camps; their families sold the work for almost nothing because Savitsky was the only buyer. He died in 1984. The collection survived because no one in Moscow looked west.
The museum, on Rzaev Street in the centre of Nukus, occupies a purpose-built building opened in 2003 with a second wing added in 2017. It is open Tuesday through Sunday; entry is around 30,000 som with a separate small fee for photography. Only a fraction of the collection is on display at any time. The city is reached by direct flights from Tashkent in about ninety minutes or by overnight train. The Mizdakhan necropolis and the ruins of Khorezmian fortresses at Ayaz Qala are within day-trip range.