Town on the edge of nowhere

On a wall in the Savitsky Museum of Art in Nukus, NW Uzbekistan, hangs a modest landscape painting from 1976 depicting the Moynaq fish canning factory. The factory itself is a relatively unobtrusive part of the scene and probably served more as a means of keeping the authorities from shipping the artist off to the gulag for the crime of rejecting the absurd values of Soviet Realism, as had happened to others. Art could not function as a means of…

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