The documentary Desert of Forbidden Art opens with a quote from legendary avant-garde artist Christo: “The work of art is a scream of freedom.” It’s a bracing truth that’s been whittled into sloganeering and brand-building tag-lines by artists, corporate sponsors, and some art patrons/fans looking to inject gravitas into the work of their favorite artist of the moment.
Desert reminds us of the historic and contemporary reality that visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers around the world literally risk their lives to do what they do. Co-directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev have crafted a paean to all such artists by focusing their lens on how art historian/archaeologist and one-time aspiring artist Igor Savitsky (1915-84) salvaged some of Russia’s (and the world’s) most impressive envelope-pushing art from both history’s dustbin, rescuing them from the ideologically driven bigotries of a brutally repressive government.
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Born into Russian aristocracy, Savitsky saw his rarified world collapse around him after the Russian revolution. He ended up taking work as an electrician in order to blend in with the proletariat, though his dream was to be an artist. Many years later, now an archeologist and art historian after one of his art heroes told him his own work was rubbish, he slyly found ways to convince the Russian government to unknowingly fund his preservation of work by artists that had been officially condemned – sometimes sent to mental hospitals, sometimes sent to the gulag, sometimes outright killed – for running afoul of Stalin and the state-sanctioned Socialist Realism movement.
The avant-garde works Savitsky saved were primarily influenced by Russian Constructivism, the School of Paris, and aspects of Islamic culture as they’d manifested in the far deserts of Russia. The wiliness with which Savitsky saved over forty thousand pieces (mainly paintings) and had the government build Nukus Museum to house it in Karakalpakstan, a dusty autonomous republic in Uzbekistan, is the stuff of political thrillers.
Co-directors Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev tell the tale using priceless old film footage ranging from archeological digs to showing Savitsy strolling through the warehouse that holds the paintings. Savitsky is voiced by Ben Kingsley as bits from his papers and correspondence are read, with Sally Field, Ed Asner, and Igor Paramonov providing other voices. Interviews with historians, reporters, associates of Savitsky, and descendants of the artists fill in the story – including the fact that most of the paintings were only accidentally saved by those descendants in the first place, many of them having been rolled up and tucked away in family closets and under beds, with some having been used as patching for leaky roofs. Pope’s and Tchavdar’s camera lovingly holds on the art, showing why many are considered masterworks, as they also build layer after layer of a dense historical context that fills in the deadly political, religious, and social tensions that made life precarious for the work and its creators.
Those same tensions linger heavily today, in Russia and around the world. This is a film for art fanatics, art historians, and anyone interested in the ways art, geography, and history are all in conversation, are all shaped by the political interests and agendas of the powerful, and how all of it can be turned by the bravery of a single person.
The film can be rented online here.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism,Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
