Avant-garde art
Once banned.
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The State Museum of Arts of Karakalpakstan, named after its founder Igor Savitsky, holds the world's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art after the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. The Guardian called it the «Louvre of Uzbekistan», and it holds more than 82,000 items. Savitsky founded it in 1966 and became its first curator. He personally gathered finds from the ancient Khorezm fortresses and Karakalpak folk art, then paintings by Russian and Central Asian artists of the Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist schools that Stalin had banned in the 1930s, saving them in this remote corner. The museum has about 10,000 avant-garde works, including some 100 paintings by Alexander Volkov, father of the Uzbek avant-garde, more than any other museum. Other halls show Karakalpak jewellery, embroidered costumes and yurt decorations, and finds from sites such as Chilpik. It moved into a new building in 2003, later joined by two more. Tickets are about 100,000 som for foreigners; phone photos are free but professional cameras pay a large fee, and it is closed on Mondays, per visitor guides.
Once banned.
Karakalpak.
From the old fortresses.
Central Nukus, capital of Karakalpakstan
It holds the world's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art, saved by its founder from Stalin's ban, alongside Khorezm antiquities and Karakalpak folk art.