Поступление, экспонирование и концептуализация «живописи новейших направлений» в Государственном музее искусств Узбекистана в 1920-х годах

This article focuses on the history of the first inclusion of avant-garde artists’ works in the collection of the Uzbekistan State Museum of Arts. It explores the attempts to create an exhibition of “contemporary painting” in the museum’s first building and the conceptualization of this new section by its curators. For the first time, certain documents related to these processes are published and analyzed. The documents stored in Russian State Archive of Literature and Art shed light on the circumstances surrounding the transfer of 59 works to the Turkestan Art Museum by the Museum Bureau of the Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Education in March–April 1921. They also suggest that the initiators of this process intended to replicate the model of the Museum of Painting Culture in Tashkent. Among the initiators was the artist and art historian Viktor Midler, who was employed by Narkompros in Tashkent during that time. Documents from the archive of Uzbekistan State Museum of Arts reveal the subsequent fate of the works transferred from Moscow to Tashkent in the 1920s. The article examines the exhibition concepts related to “contemporary painting” developed by the museum curators, allowing us to trace the evolution of the Soviet government’s attitude toward avant-garde art through its official cultural institutions. Of particular interest are the archival records that highlight the role of Alexander Volkov, a leading modernist artist in Tashkent, in shaping the new painting exhibition at the Art Museum. This article introduces documents and data into scholarly discourse, providing an accurate reconstruction of events related to the formation of the SMAU collection in its early years and analyzing the museum’s scholarly and exhibition activities in the field of avant-garde art during the 1920s.