Treasures hidden in the desert from Stalin

international | arts and media | other press Wednesday September 01, 2004 12:34 by pat c

A report on how an art find of 90,000 works saved from Stalin are now in danger of perishing.

Treasures hidden in the desert from Stalin

MIDWAY through a scorching afternoon, the only people at the Karakalpakstan State Museum are a few children cooling off in the fountains outside. The lack of visitors is hardly surprising, because of its location in a former chemical weapons base in southwest Uzbekistan, an arid region that bore the brunt of the ecological disaster when Soviet irrigation projects drained the Aral Sea.

To get here means either a three-hour flight on a rickety Russian aircraft from Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, or a four-day drive through the desert, where temperatures can hit 50C (122F).

But the museum’s isolation explains its extraordinary contents — one of the world’s finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art from the 1920s and 1930s, much of it by dissident artists who died in the gulags.

It was founded by Igor Savitsky, an eccentric painter who risked persecution and imprisonment to bring thousands of avant-garde works to this remote region when they were banned by Josef Stalin in favour of Social Realist art that served the communist cause.

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