thenationofartists.com

First printed at www.movingpicturesnetwork.com

Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2010 Heartland Film Festival)

Directed/Written by: Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev
Starring: Marina Babanazarova and Stephen Kinzer; voiced by Sally Field, Ed Asner and Sir Ben Kingsley

“The Desert of Forbidden Art” proves that, in many societies, the creation of art is a scream for freedom. For Igor Savitsky, art equaled life, and his own was dedicated to saving the work of artists whose lives could have been meaningless without his efforts. In fact, many of the pieces rescued have since become the only remnants of their creators’ existences.

The artists represented by the collection stayed true to their visions despite the terrible costs associated with being an artist in their oppressed political regime. Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev contextualize the work well, depicting the Soviet concentration camps in evidence to Stalin’s murderous ways.

Artists in this era were carted off to mental hospitals. Works they produced were labeled “anti-Soviet” and “degenerate.” In the Soviet system, religious institutions (churches, monasteries, etc.) either became prisons for artworks or found themselves stripped of artistic archives.

But in the midst of all this pain came Savitsky. Born to a life of privilege, he found his status turned upside-down by WWI, when he was forced to hide among the proletariat. It seems Savitsky would have become an artist himself had his work not been labeled by an artist he admired as “mere daubery.” Humorously, in retrospect, he was regarded as the “rubbish man,” collecting the folk artistry of the region, bringing it to rest in a gallery in a remote town in the desert sands of Nukus, located in a province of Uzbekistan.

Despite the dusty town, the museum is a pinnacle of modernism, perhaps a North Asian equivalent to the Barnes Foundation’s importance to impressionism. Savitsky, like Barnes, was a collector who curated a collection when no one valued it, and was then forced to fight to keep it when its true value was realized.

Pope and Georgiev’s documentary is as much about Soviet identity in the early 1930s as it is about the museum in Nukus, and creates awareness for a legacy still largely unknown and not fully appreciated. The documentary is inherently interesting, and the hope is that it will do some bidding for the survival of the museum and/or its collection. Whether the works continue to remain vulnerable to wavering finances may have as much to do with the isolation of this institution , how can those with the mega-funds needed relate to this find in a desert they’ll rarely visit in a place that’s barely known? And will this documentary be enough?

The documentary suggests that, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s acquisition (some would say “theft”) of the Barnes collection, the most threatening wolf at the door is the likelihood that Russia will somehow assume control of the works for exhibition in Moscow.

The greatest irony to the collection is that Savitsky never received official permission to buy the art in the first place, his sheer, strange, anarchical autonomy enabling him to have collected 44,000 paintings and graphics by the time of his death in 1984.

That his collection might be threatened by the region’s nationalism and radical Islamic practices suggests that some sort of anarchy and uncertainty will continue to set the prevailing agenda. We must hope, however, that calmer minds will prevail.