In the early decades of the last century, a geographical area known at the time as Turkestan, and in particular its capital Tashkent, attracted a lively galaxy of artists from other parts of Asia and the Soviet Union who, after studying art in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev or Paris, were active in this region of Central Asia. Among the notable figures who were the moving spirits in what has been called the “Oriental Avant-Garde” was Ural Tansykbayev, one of the twentieth century’s most important Uzbek painters.
This volume – also the catalogue of the most significant retrospective devoted to the artist in the past forty years – retraces Tansykbayev’s trajectory from his early phase, marked by experimentation and the swift emergence of a distinctive modernist voice, through the 1940s and 1950s, when his painterly technique underwent a profound transformation and landscape became his artistic niche, until the period of the Thaw (1954-64), when he successfully blended the tonal refinement of the previous decades with the colouristic experiments of his early years, so acquiring a particularly symbolic universal vision of the world.
Enriched with essays by two important scholars, Zelfira Tregulova and Olga Polyanskaya, and by an illustrated biography, the book is a true monographoic study of the painter who has gone down to history as the “Uzbek Matisse”.
Volume in English.
