State Art Museum of Uzbekistan

The State Art Museum of Uzbekistan, known in Uzbek as Oʻzbekiston Davlat Sanʻat muzeyi, is the largest national art museum in Tashkent, the capital of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Founded in 1918, it houses a permanent collection of several thousand works divided among four curatorial departments. The museum holds particular significance as the principal repository of both Uzbek national art and the most important collection of Western European painting in Central Asia, reflecting the region's complex cultural history under Russian and Soviet rule and its subsequent independence.

The museum was established in 1918 as the Museum of People University, then renamed the Central Arts Museum. In 1924 it became the Tashkent Art Museum, receiving its current name, the Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, in 1935. From its founding until 1935, it occupied the former palace of Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich of Russia, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. In 1935 the collection moved to the People's House, which served as its home until that building was demolished in 1974. The current building was completed the same year to replace the destroyed structure. The museum gained international attention in 2014 when its chief curator, Mirfayz Usmonov, was discovered to have been selling artworks on the black market for fifteen years and replacing them with copies. He was prosecuted and sentenced to nine years in prison, while two other museum employees received eight-year sentences each.

The museum's collections are organized into four departments: National Applied Art of Uzbekistan, Fine Arts of Uzbekistan, Russian and Western Art, and Far Eastern Art. The initial collection comprised approximately one hundred works from Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich and other private collections, nationalized in April 1918. These were primarily paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, and porcelain by Russian and Western European masters. The collection was immediately expanded with works from the Turkestan local history museum. Between 1920 and 1924, the museum received 116 works of Ukrainian and Russian art from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries from museum collections in Moscow and Leningrad, including portraits by Vladimir Borovikovsky, Karl Bryullov, Ilya Repin, Vasily Tropinin, and Nikolai Yaroshenko. The museum also acquired approximately 250 paintings by pre-revolutionary Russian and non-Russian artists active in Central Asia, including Igor Kazakov, Nikolay Karazin, and William Sommer. From the second half of the 1930s onward, the collection expanded primarily through works by Uzbek artists such as Usto Mumin, Pavel Benkov, and Leo Bure. The French Wikipedia source notes the collection at approximately fifty thousand pieces.

The museum's most significant holdings include its foundational collection of Russian and Western European works nationalized from Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich in 1918, featuring paintings, drawings, and decorative arts. The transferred works from Moscow and Leningrad between 1920 and 1924 form a core of Russian academic and realist painting, with notable portraits by major artists of the period. The approximately 250 paintings acquired depicting Central Asia under the Russian Empire represent a distinctive documentary and artistic record of the region. The French source identifies this as the most important collection of Western painting in all of Central Asia. The Uzbek fine arts collection, developed from the mid-1930s, includes works by foundational figures of modern Uzbek art. The museum also maintains collections of national applied arts and Far Eastern art, though specific major works in these categories are not detailed in the available sources.

The current museum building was designed by three Soviet architects, I. Abdulov, A.K. Nikiforov, and S.A. Rosenblum, and was completed in 1974 on the site of the former People's House, which had been destroyed in the 1966 Tashkent earthquake. The structure takes the form of a large cube, with facades divided into rectangular sections separated by metal frames and lined with aluminum sheets on the exterior. The lower portion of the building and the entrance are faced with polished gray marble. The upper sections are glazed with chrom-brugnatellite, a material that filters sunlight to create matte interior illumination. The building underwent renovation in 1997.

The State Art Museum of Uzbekistan is located in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Its official website is http://www.stateartmuseum.uz. The museum continues to serve as the nation's premier art institution, housing permanent collections and hosting exhibitions of both Uzbek and international artists. The museum is state-owned and operates as a public cultural institution.