Keepers of the Lost Art - Savitsky Nukus Art Museum

Video - Keepers of the lost art (18:26) - Journeyman Pictures

Australian SBS/Dateline piece from 2002 on the famous Nukus Art Museum that houses the largest collection of Art and Ethnographic relics in Uzbekistan (ED: The collection is now housed in a modern gallery however this Video is well worth looking at to get a feel for the Savitsky Art Museum and its facsinating history).

For transcript go to

http://journeyman.tv/?lid=15064&tmpl=transcript

One of the most famous museums in Uzbekistan, a real phenomenon is the Karakalpak State Art Museum in Nukus. Known as the "museum in the desert" by the CIS art community. It is named after its founder and the first director Igor Savitsky. The archeological exhibits of the museum tell about the intellectual wealth and culture of the ancient state Khorezm - the cradle of Zoroastrian doctrines, about trade relations of the Khoresmians with the antique world. The museum houses a big collection of unique medieval ceramics, national Karakalpak silver and cornelian jewelry, traditional carpets. But what makes the museum known world-wide is its collection of Russian and Central Asian avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Considered to be second only to the collection at the Russian Museum in St-Petersburg. In the halls of the Karakalpak State Art Museum there are exhibited early works by A.Volkov and U.Tansykbayeva, the canvases by famous artists-impressionists who lived in Uzbekistan including P.Benkov and Z.Kovalevskaya and Russian avant-garde artists of the beginning of the 20th century P.Kuznetsov, A.Kuprin, N.Ulianov, V.Rojdestvenskiy. Some of the masterpieces from the museum collection have been exhibited in Russia, Switzerland, France, and Italy.