A museum packed with once banned art is flourishing in the Uzbek desert – The Art Newspaper

Nukus Museum’s vast cache of Russian avant-garde and national folk art is driving cultural tourism.

In a corner of Uzbekistan, close to the cracked, muddy crater that was once the Aral Sea, lies an unlikely treasure trove. The I.V. Savitsky State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan (as the museum is formally designated), in the city of Nukus, holds close to 100,000 works of art from the middle decades of the 20th century: canvases, etchings and naturalistic sketches of rural life alongside folk art and textiles from a region whose vast, unbounded expanses were crossed for a thousand years by the caravans, travellers and thieves of the ancient Silk Road.

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