When did the Central Asian avant-garde begin?

Art studios were opened in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Andijan. Many artists received education in the art studios of Moscow, St. Petersburg, at the Higher Art School of the Academy of Arts, at the Higher Art and Technical Studios and many others.

This period is marked by a high influx of artists from Russia that embraced Uzbekistan as their second home, emerged as unique artistic personas, and significantly contributed to the development of a distinctive school of visual arts. This period from the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s went down in history as a period of freedom, liberation of the creative spirit, and simultaneous coexistence of various art styles: realism and the artistic manifestation of avant-garde. 

S. Yudin, I. Kazakov, M. Novikov, and a little later P. Benkov continued the traditions of ethnographic realism, and impressionism. But mostly, this was a decade during which a unique phenomenon known as “Central Asian avant-garde” emerged, all of whose representatives (except for R. Mazel) lived and worked in Uzbekistan.

You can learn more about this topic in the book-album "The Collection of Art in the State Tretyakov Gallery" (Volume III) (Moscow, Russia) from the series "The Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan".

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