In the early 20th century, Russian and European artists became highly interested in the culture of the East. They turned their eyes to it to enrich their semantic and plastic language. This is how the phenomenon known as "orientalism" was born. Many Russian painters came to Uzbekistan, where they found a new creative breath and a second homeland. Among them were the students of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, such as V. Vereshchagin, N. Karazin, R. Zommer, S. Dudin, S. Yudin, L. Bure and others. In their turn, they contributed to the development of fine art in Uzbekistan and Central Asia. Since the 1920s, the national school of fine arts was forming in Uzbekistan, many representatives of which could already receive professional training. The period from the late 1920s to the early 1930s was the time of creative freedom, when realism and artistic searches different from it co-existed, resulting in the appearance of a phenomenon known as "Central Asian avant-garde". The works of national painters and those visiting Uzbekistan, created between the first half of the 19th and the early 21st centuries and now stored in the Tretyakov Gallery, are presented in this volume. Among the brightest names whose work is presented in the volume are U. Tansykbayev, A. Volkov, P. Benkov, N. Karakhan, N. Kashina, E. Karavay, Ch. Akhmarov, R. Akhmedov and many others.