In Soviet times Nukus was a closed city. Home to a chemical weapons lab and the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan it is 20 hours from Tashkent by train and 200 km south of the Aral Sea. Surrounded by desert and scrub it is the perfect place to hide - in this case a collection of art by dissident painters.
Which is exactly what Igor Savitsky did in the 30 years between arriving in the 1950s and his death in 1984. During this time he amassed more than 90,000 works, many of which were smuggled in from Moscow at a time when artists were imprisoned for deviating from the norms of Socialist Realism.
It was a risky business. Not only was the art proscribed and the artists banned but collecting them could get you labelled an enemy of the people.
But Nukus was a backwater, and what was forbidden in the centre might be easily overlooked in the provinces.
These days the collection is housed on two floors of a new marble building. The paintings are labelled in three languages. Some have toured the world.
But none of this describes the real significance of the place. Not all the art is good. Some is exceptional, others ordinary. The museum is clearly the product of a single collector; his passions, vices, fancies and shortcomings.
The real power comes instead from two things. One is that all the works are pictures. No room here for the spastic palsy of abstract expressionism, the stripped down emptiness of minimalism or the fads and jerks of conceptualism. The paintings tell you as much about the world outside as they do about art.
The other is that the works exist in a universe that is neither pre nor post but simply outside Duchamp. You can see the influences – late Cezanne, Matissse, early Picasso – but then there is no further contact. The artists were isolated and followed their own paths. A cul de sac, to be sure, but how interesting a vision of what might have been. And was, far out here in the desert.
www.savitskycollection.org
