Uzbekistan on Canvas: A Visual History in Twentieth-century Painting

During the 2024 Biennale, in Venice and Florence, masterpieces from the Nukus and Tashkent state museums in Uzbekistan were presented to the European public for the first time. The artistic and cultural significance of a virtually unknown area of twentieth-century painting finally came to light. This volume offers an extensive introduction to Uzbek pictorial culture during the first half of the twentieth century—when the country gained institutional autonomy, as a republic within the Soviet Union—with a focus on the extraordinary artistic experience defined by the authors of this volume as the Avanguardia Orientalis. This movement, spanning at least three decades, involved Uzbek, Kazakh, Armenian, Russian, Eastern Russian, Jewish, Siberian, Azerbaijani, and Ukrainian artists. Through their deep commitment to “dialogue,” they created an authentic, original, and recognizable language, albeit one expressed with various individual nuances. This book names sixteen key iconographic themes—from caravans to clothing, landscapes to still lifes—each explored through a representative work and a series of comparative studies of pieces by the same artist and their contemporaries. Readers will discover a visual repertoire almost never seen in the West, including paintings housed in Uzbekistan’s most important museums as well as rare historical photographs.