The Savitsky Museum

I've got a thing for Russian art. I am not going to pretend for a minute that I know much about it, or art in general. However, something about Russian art makes me weak in the knees. It is possible that my Ukranian great-grandmother's genetic influence is responsible, given my brother shares my obsession as well. The Hermitage would our mecca, however I just read about this:

"The Savitsky Art Museum, Nukus, is the ridiculous to the Taj Mahal’s sublime. If you get to Nukus in the semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, you will almost certainly be the only person you know who has. It is the most depressing and ugly place in the world; a rotting Stalinist excrescence built in the uncared-for nether-regions of the old Soviet Empire. It's a place that even in the old USSR was a forgettable, unimportant backwater, and it was precisely because no-one came here or cared about Nukus that one of the great art collections was built here by a remarkable archaeologist, who quietly saved the work of underground and officially degenerate artists. From the 1930s to the 1970s, he bought and was given artists’ entire portfolios. It is a remarkable and humbling collection, thousands upon thousands of paintings, drawings and sculptures produced in the face of great danger. The most moving examples come from the Gulag. Together this crammed and desperately under-funded gallery is a memorial to the power of culture, a candle of artistic resistance. The quality of the work varies hugely, from the great to the chronically derivative, but that’s not the point. Altogether they have a unique power."

-AA Gill