Homage to Savitsky. Collecting 20th-Century Russian and Uzbek Art

Unnoticed by the international art world until recently, the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art - located in Nukus, Uzbekistan - houses the second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world (after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg). This extraordinary museum is the life`s work of Igor Vitalievich Savitsky, a Russian painter born in Kiev who first visited Karakalpakstan in 1950 as a member of the famous Khorezm Archeological&Ethnographic; Expedition led by Sergei Tolstov. Subsequently, having moved from Moscow to Nukus, Savitsky began collecting the works of the Russian avant-garde - including those by such well-known names as Falk, Mukhina, Koudriachov, Popova, and Redko - whose paintings were banned during Stalin`s rule and through the 1960s because they did not conform to the officially prescribed Soviet`socialist realism`school of art. The current English language publication, already issued in Russian in 2011, helps make the Savitsky Collection accessible to a broad international audience for the first time. ISBN:978-3-89790-430-9