My friend and former client Mary had forwarded a link to a film a couple week ago. She and her husband had seen the film "The Desert of Forbidden Art" at the Denver Film Festival, and really enjoyed it, and noted there were upcoming screenings in New York.
An art loving friend and I went to see the documentary, which had that astounding effect of seeing something new for the very first time.
Artists, oppressed under Soviet regime, were primarily sent to mental hospitals, concentration camps or executed. Their art was illegal and never shown to the outside world. Some artists were allowed to remain artists though their art was expressions of party propaganda and approved images (happy peasants working cheerfully in the fields), not true expressions of their soul.
Igor Savitsky, a former Russian aristocrat whose passion was art, had a vision of rescuing this forbidden art, and creating a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, under the radar of the KGB -- the 'boon docks' to most of civilization, unless you happen to be a camel!
After the Soviet regime collapsed, a New York Times writer was asked to cover the region 'that nobody in the world really ever thought about" visited the museum that now held 40,000 works of art. He said:
"It didn't take me more than a few minutes of walking around this museum for my jaw to drop..."
This is an incredible story...
I'm so glad you liked the movie, Laura! It's not only an unusual story, but has great themes: art vs. totalitarian politics, creative expression vs. commercialism, culture in the desert, and on and on. It's available on DVD now, too.
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