Assouline has released Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde Orientalists in time for the holidays. The new coffee-table tome was written by Prosper Assouline’s sister, Yaffa Assouline, and details art collector, Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky, who dedicated his life to saving the world’s most important works of Russian avant-garde art, which would have otherwise disappeared forever under Stalin’s regime. Today, the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art once called “the Louvre of the Steppes” now holds one of the largest collections of this art, second only to the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“It is a world filled with color, light, vivid observations, and symbolic connotations; a world that existed long before the artists put it on a canvas or on paper. This book not only presents a unique selection of 20th-century paintings from the collection of the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art, in Nukus, Uzbekistan. It also embodies a vision — a vision of this land, in all its picturesqueness and irresistible charm.” – Zelfira Tregulova, Director General of the State Tretyakov Gallery