REPORTER: Kim Traill
History has not been kind to Nukus. This one-time oasis in the central Asian steppe is now a bleak and desolate place. Years of Soviet chemical weapons tests in the nearby desert have covered the sands in a lethal dust which blows constantly across the Karakalpak capital. The Aral Sea disaster has left the town almost without water. But, thanks to the lifelong passion of one man, Nukus does have one thing to be proud of. It is the most unlikely place for perhaps the world's most extraordinary collection of art. This remote and desolate town has become home to a vast collection of dissident artworks, rescued from destruction by a Russian called Igor Savitsky.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA, DIRECTOR, NUKUS MUSEUM: He started to bring the art of forgotten, forbidden artists to Nukus, which was a very provincial place, far off political control and this is the reason why, in Nukus, we have the world's second collection of Russian avant-garde.
Marinika Bobonazarova took over as the director of the Nukus Museum after Savitsky died in 1984. Igor Savitsky was born into a rich, aristocratic family in 1915. He first came to Uzbekistan in 1950 as an artist and sketcher for an archaeological expedition.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: In this room, we show Igor Savitsky's paintings, which were done by him in the student times and in his central Asian period. You can see villages of Karakalpakstan, Nukus of '50s, '60s, when it was still a green city until ecological disaster destroyed its face. So it's a kind of artistic document of Karakalpakstan's past.
Savitsky became concerned that the traditions and folklore of the country were disappearing beneath the new Soviet culture and talked the Ministry of Culture into establishing and funding a museum to preserve local crafts.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: During several years, he managed to gather what we call now 'genetic fund of Karakalpaks', several thousand of works, of crafts of Karakalpaks, yurt decoration, jewellery, costumes.
In the early 1960s, using this venture as a cover, Igor Savitsky began the dangerous task of collecting the works of dissident artists.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: In this room, you can see Mikhail Sokolov's paintings, who was one of the brightest personalities from our collection. Though his art is really brilliant, his life was really very tragic. In the '30s, he was repressed, as many artists from our collection, and he was sent to Taiga, the camp for political prisoners in Siberia.
The cultural authorities of Stalin's regime brutally repressed hundreds of artists like Mikhail Sokolov. In 1934, Stalin issued a decree deeming Soviet socialist realism as the only acceptable artistic genre. Artists were required to paint images which glorified the party, portraying happy, well-fed Soviet citizens. Anyone who deviated from this path was a dissident. Such avant-garde styles as cubism and fauvism were labelled 'degenerate', 'bourgeois', 'formalist'.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Those people who were just ignored, they were lucky people, because they were not physically destroyed, but some people, as, for example, Mikhail Korzin, they were sent to prisons, to concentration camps.
These are some of Mikhail Korzin's works. He was imprisoned twice, once for merely praising the art of Picasso, an artist of a bourgeois country.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: What we see here in this room are his paintings of later period, at the time when he was already released, and as those people who suffered from the regime, he was not given job and he was dragging miserable life, having nothing to do, having no means for life, having nothing to eat. But, nevertheless, he managed to create these real masterpieces, still lives with food, which are real feasts of life, which are very optimistic, though his life was so difficult. And he was suffering, really, from malnutrition and he created these wonderful pilaf and shish kebab and these pelmeni, dumplings.
Prison was also the fate for this artist, a Russian who converted to Islam and changed his name to Ustomomin.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: He was really fascinated by oriental culture and penetrated very deeply into it, but the authorities were suspicious about this man because of his sexual orientation. This also a great guilt in those years and he was repressed for this reason.
To many of the persecuted artists and their families, Igor Savitsky became both their saviour and inspiration.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): He was the ideal audience, the perfect audience every painter dreams about, someone who would look at and understand it, who wouldn't just shower him with praise, but would see what the artist wanted to do. Savitsky knew how to do this. He found obscure paintings.
Irina Karavai is now in her 70s, but still works in a small studio in Moscow. Her mother, Elena, was one of the artists whose work was criticised by the Soviet authorities. Many of her works were destroyed.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): For many years, she didn't paint at all. What she had was a succession of odd jobs. For example, she worked at a plastics factory. She used to design toys for them, and other things. At least she had work then. There were years when she didn't have any work at all. She worked for park administration in Sokolniki. She painted signs and posters for them. Posters for children, you know, "Don't harm the trees," etc. Those were the hard times.
Irina's mother was also refused membership of the artists' union.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): In the end, it all pushed her into mental illness. That was the state she was in when she died. She might have been predisposed, but she had to fight for her art with all her strength. And she never stopped, she never let up, and everything she did, she did as an artist.
Many of Elena Karavai's works now hang in the Nukus Museum. This self-portrait with her daughter was painted when Irina was just five years old. Irina credits Savitsky with encouraging her mother and others not to give up their art.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): When an artist could see her work was not in vain, that was wonderful on a purely personal level. And then the museum, exhibitions... As I told you, he took her paintings, and, within a year, everything was restored and exhibited in Moscow. And, straight away, she was accepted by the public as an artist among artists, if not something more than that. Before that, people had heard of her talent, but thought she'd been wasting it painting toys. So it was a big development. And he continued buying her new works so, financially, we never went back to the situation where we had no money at all.
Lubov Truskova was another friend and ally of Igor Savitsky. She now works in a small Moscow museum but, in Soviet days, she worked for the Ministry of Culture. Her department was in charge of organising the purchase of works for the provincial museums, including Nukus.
LUBOV TRUSKOVA (Translation): All purchases were arranged through the ministry. The museums just sent in their requests. This way, the museums couldn't buy anything they weren't supposed to have. We had to manoeuvre all the time. We had to. Things weren't all that wonderful. We had to wait on occasions for an official who would have had a negative response to go away. Sometimes, we had to act quickly while the money was still there. Or we had to stall the procedure because we knew the paperwork wouldn't go through. So we stepped on the brakes. Or sometimes people would say, "It's that Savitsky. He'll be buying God knows what. And God knows what will happen to it so far away."
It was only in 1985 that the political regime in the USSR changed its attitude towards this so-called formalist art. Until then, Nukus was the only place where such works could be seen on such a scale.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Nobody cared about those people, about their art. These paintings were lying in the attics in the basements, under the beds, under the cupboards, everywhere, in the roles, in the tubes, many of them started to destroy and he restored hundreds of works immediately and saved these paintings for future generations.
Some of the artists represented in Nukus did become famous in the West. Works by Lubov Popova for example sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Nukus gallery has seven of her works. But, in Nukus, money is as scarce as visitors. On a typical day, only one or two people will come to see a collection that now has more than 90,000 works of art. Most of those on display are housed on the second floor of the former ministry of agriculture on Nukus's main street. Others are in a former city council building several blocks away. Only a fraction is on display. The rest are kept in storerooms in the basements. Valentina Seichova has worked here for 30 years, Svetlana Turutina for 25. There are four rooms like this, crammed with oil paintings, sketches and watercolours. Many are in dire need of restoration. There are so many works here that they still haven't all been catalogued. Up to 30,000 of the works at Nukus are considered avant-garde or underground.
SVETLANA TURUTINA (Translation): This is a painting by Borovaya. We don't have many of her works. But all of them are treasures of our collection and very important to us, because the painter spent most of her life in Stalin's labour camps. All her paintings that we have here were created while she was inside in a concentration camp in Mordovia. Her works portray everyday life in a woman's prison camp.
Most of these works would not have survived were they not rescued by Savitsky. The Nukus collection became his life.
VALENTINA SEICHOVA (Translation): Savitsky died in Moscow, but he was buried in Nukus, because, even in death, he wanted to be where the museum was. The museum was his child. He didn't have children of his own, so this museum became his family, his relatives, the most valuable part of his life.
In 1976, work began on a new building to house the collection, right in the main square. 26 years later, it's still a shell.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: We dream about the new building, which is still under the construction and we need about $1 million to finish this building.
But, the museum steadfastly refuses to sell off the collection to raise money.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Since 1991, we started to have a lot of visitors who want to buy something from our collection, or people advise us to do this in order to settle our problems, our financial problems, or they say we can build a museum if we sell five or six paintings. For us, it's a very sensitive subject. It's like to sell your baby somewhere, so we feel like this when people say about this to us. Sometimes, we understand that maybe it would be better to move the museum to a more favourable place, to a better place, where people will appreciate this collection really. But, on the other hand again, we feel guilty, because Karakalpakstan is the land that saved this art, and this place gave shelter to this art, and to move this collection to a better place will be like a betrayal maybe for these people and country.
History has not been kind to Nukus. This one-time oasis in the central Asian steppe is now a bleak and desolate place. Years of Soviet chemical weapons tests in the nearby desert have covered the sands in a lethal dust which blows constantly across the Karakalpak capital. The Aral Sea disaster has left the town almost without water. But, thanks to the lifelong passion of one man, Nukus does have one thing to be proud of. It is the most unlikely place for perhaps the world's most extraordinary collection of art. This remote and desolate town has become home to a vast collection of dissident artworks, rescued from destruction by a Russian called Igor Savitsky.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA, DIRECTOR, NUKUS MUSEUM: He started to bring the art of forgotten, forbidden artists to Nukus, which was a very provincial place, far off political control and this is the reason why, in Nukus, we have the world's second collection of Russian avant-garde.
Marinika Bobonazarova took over as the director of the Nukus Museum after Savitsky died in 1984. Igor Savitsky was born into a rich, aristocratic family in 1915. He first came to Uzbekistan in 1950 as an artist and sketcher for an archaeological expedition.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: In this room, we show Igor Savitsky's paintings, which were done by him in the student times and in his central Asian period. You can see villages of Karakalpakstan, Nukus of '50s, '60s, when it was still a green city until ecological disaster destroyed its face. So it's a kind of artistic document of Karakalpakstan's past.
Savitsky became concerned that the traditions and folklore of the country were disappearing beneath the new Soviet culture and talked the Ministry of Culture into establishing and funding a museum to preserve local crafts.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: During several years, he managed to gather what we call now 'genetic fund of Karakalpaks', several thousand of works, of crafts of Karakalpaks, yurt decoration, jewellery, costumes.
In the early 1960s, using this venture as a cover, Igor Savitsky began the dangerous task of collecting the works of dissident artists.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: In this room, you can see Mikhail Sokolov's paintings, who was one of the brightest personalities from our collection. Though his art is really brilliant, his life was really very tragic. In the '30s, he was repressed, as many artists from our collection, and he was sent to Taiga, the camp for political prisoners in Siberia.
The cultural authorities of Stalin's regime brutally repressed hundreds of artists like Mikhail Sokolov. In 1934, Stalin issued a decree deeming Soviet socialist realism as the only acceptable artistic genre. Artists were required to paint images which glorified the party, portraying happy, well-fed Soviet citizens. Anyone who deviated from this path was a dissident. Such avant-garde styles as cubism and fauvism were labelled 'degenerate', 'bourgeois', 'formalist'.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Those people who were just ignored, they were lucky people, because they were not physically destroyed, but some people, as, for example, Mikhail Korzin, they were sent to prisons, to concentration camps.
These are some of Mikhail Korzin's works. He was imprisoned twice, once for merely praising the art of Picasso, an artist of a bourgeois country.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: What we see here in this room are his paintings of later period, at the time when he was already released, and as those people who suffered from the regime, he was not given job and he was dragging miserable life, having nothing to do, having no means for life, having nothing to eat. But, nevertheless, he managed to create these real masterpieces, still lives with food, which are real feasts of life, which are very optimistic, though his life was so difficult. And he was suffering, really, from malnutrition and he created these wonderful pilaf and shish kebab and these pelmeni, dumplings.
Prison was also the fate for this artist, a Russian who converted to Islam and changed his name to Ustomomin.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: He was really fascinated by oriental culture and penetrated very deeply into it, but the authorities were suspicious about this man because of his sexual orientation. This also a great guilt in those years and he was repressed for this reason.
To many of the persecuted artists and their families, Igor Savitsky became both their saviour and inspiration.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): He was the ideal audience, the perfect audience every painter dreams about, someone who would look at and understand it, who wouldn't just shower him with praise, but would see what the artist wanted to do. Savitsky knew how to do this. He found obscure paintings.
Irina Karavai is now in her 70s, but still works in a small studio in Moscow. Her mother, Elena, was one of the artists whose work was criticised by the Soviet authorities. Many of her works were destroyed.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): For many years, she didn't paint at all. What she had was a succession of odd jobs. For example, she worked at a plastics factory. She used to design toys for them, and other things. At least she had work then. There were years when she didn't have any work at all. She worked for park administration in Sokolniki. She painted signs and posters for them. Posters for children, you know, "Don't harm the trees," etc. Those were the hard times.
Irina's mother was also refused membership of the artists' union.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): In the end, it all pushed her into mental illness. That was the state she was in when she died. She might have been predisposed, but she had to fight for her art with all her strength. And she never stopped, she never let up, and everything she did, she did as an artist.
Many of Elena Karavai's works now hang in the Nukus Museum. This self-portrait with her daughter was painted when Irina was just five years old. Irina credits Savitsky with encouraging her mother and others not to give up their art.
IRINA KARAVAI (Translation): When an artist could see her work was not in vain, that was wonderful on a purely personal level. And then the museum, exhibitions... As I told you, he took her paintings, and, within a year, everything was restored and exhibited in Moscow. And, straight away, she was accepted by the public as an artist among artists, if not something more than that. Before that, people had heard of her talent, but thought she'd been wasting it painting toys. So it was a big development. And he continued buying her new works so, financially, we never went back to the situation where we had no money at all.
Lubov Truskova was another friend and ally of Igor Savitsky. She now works in a small Moscow museum but, in Soviet days, she worked for the Ministry of Culture. Her department was in charge of organising the purchase of works for the provincial museums, including Nukus.
LUBOV TRUSKOVA (Translation): All purchases were arranged through the ministry. The museums just sent in their requests. This way, the museums couldn't buy anything they weren't supposed to have. We had to manoeuvre all the time. We had to. Things weren't all that wonderful. We had to wait on occasions for an official who would have had a negative response to go away. Sometimes, we had to act quickly while the money was still there. Or we had to stall the procedure because we knew the paperwork wouldn't go through. So we stepped on the brakes. Or sometimes people would say, "It's that Savitsky. He'll be buying God knows what. And God knows what will happen to it so far away."
It was only in 1985 that the political regime in the USSR changed its attitude towards this so-called formalist art. Until then, Nukus was the only place where such works could be seen on such a scale.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Nobody cared about those people, about their art. These paintings were lying in the attics in the basements, under the beds, under the cupboards, everywhere, in the roles, in the tubes, many of them started to destroy and he restored hundreds of works immediately and saved these paintings for future generations.
Some of the artists represented in Nukus did become famous in the West. Works by Lubov Popova for example sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Nukus gallery has seven of her works. But, in Nukus, money is as scarce as visitors. On a typical day, only one or two people will come to see a collection that now has more than 90,000 works of art. Most of those on display are housed on the second floor of the former ministry of agriculture on Nukus's main street. Others are in a former city council building several blocks away. Only a fraction is on display. The rest are kept in storerooms in the basements. Valentina Seichova has worked here for 30 years, Svetlana Turutina for 25. There are four rooms like this, crammed with oil paintings, sketches and watercolours. Many are in dire need of restoration. There are so many works here that they still haven't all been catalogued. Up to 30,000 of the works at Nukus are considered avant-garde or underground.
SVETLANA TURUTINA (Translation): This is a painting by Borovaya. We don't have many of her works. But all of them are treasures of our collection and very important to us, because the painter spent most of her life in Stalin's labour camps. All her paintings that we have here were created while she was inside in a concentration camp in Mordovia. Her works portray everyday life in a woman's prison camp.
Most of these works would not have survived were they not rescued by Savitsky. The Nukus collection became his life.
VALENTINA SEICHOVA (Translation): Savitsky died in Moscow, but he was buried in Nukus, because, even in death, he wanted to be where the museum was. The museum was his child. He didn't have children of his own, so this museum became his family, his relatives, the most valuable part of his life.
In 1976, work began on a new building to house the collection, right in the main square. 26 years later, it's still a shell.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: We dream about the new building, which is still under the construction and we need about $1 million to finish this building.
But, the museum steadfastly refuses to sell off the collection to raise money.
MARINIKA BOBONAZAROVA: Since 1991, we started to have a lot of visitors who want to buy something from our collection, or people advise us to do this in order to settle our problems, our financial problems, or they say we can build a museum if we sell five or six paintings. For us, it's a very sensitive subject. It's like to sell your baby somewhere, so we feel like this when people say about this to us. Sometimes, we understand that maybe it would be better to move the museum to a more favourable place, to a better place, where people will appreciate this collection really. But, on the other hand again, we feel guilty, because Karakalpakstan is the land that saved this art, and this place gave shelter to this art, and to move this collection to a better place will be like a betrayal maybe for these people and country.