Igor Savitsky

Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky was born on 4 (17) August 1915 in Kyiv into a lawyer’s family. His maternal grandfather, Timofey Florinsky, was a well-known Slavicist, a professor at Kyiv University and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1920s the family moved to Moscow. Savitsky trained as an electrician at the factory school of the Serp i Molot plant and, alongside, took private drawing lessons from the Moscow artists R. Mazel and E. Sakhnovskaya.

From 1934 he studied in the graphics department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute and then at the Moscow Art School in Memory of 1905. In 1938–1941 he worked in the studio of Lev Kramarenko at the Institute for the Advanced Training of Artists, travelling with him to sketch in Crimea and the Caucasus. In 1941 he entered the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute; unfit for the army because of illness, he spent 1942–1944 with the institute in evacuation in Samarkand, where he met Robert Falk and Konstantin Istomin and took painting lessons from Nikolay Ulyanov. He graduated in December 1946, specialising in etching.

In 1950, at the invitation of T. A. Zhdanko, Savitsky came to Karakalpakia as artist of the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences, led by Sergey Tolstov, and settled there the same year. On trips to Karakalpak villages he began collecting examples of folk applied art. From 1956 he was a researcher in the applied-art department of the Karakalpak Research Institute of Economics and Culture, from 1959 at the Institute of History, Language and Literature of the Karakalpak branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, and later at the Karakalpak Museum of History and Local Lore.

In the 1960s Savitsky began bringing to Nukus works by artists rejected by official Soviet art — masters of the avant-garde and post-avant-garde — buying them in Moscow and other cities from the artists or their heirs. In 1966 the State Museum of Arts of the Karakalpak ASSR opened in Nukus, and Savitsky became its first director. In time the USSR Ministry of Culture also began to support his acquisitions; in 1975 he was invited to select for the museum part of the works that Nadezhda Léger, the widow of Fernand Léger, had given to the USSR Ministry of Culture.

In 1964 Savitsky was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR, and he also held the title of People’s Artist of Karakalpakstan. He died in a Moscow hospital on 27 July 1984 after a long illness and was buried in the Russian cemetery in Nukus. The museum now bears his name, and its holdings run to tens of thousands of items: Karakalpak applied art, archaeological finds from Khorezm, and Russian and Central Asian avant-garde art of the twentieth century. In 2002 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit”.