State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan

History and collection

Founded in 1918 as the People's University Museum, it has been the Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan since 1935. Its first holdings were 100 works nationalised in April 1918, chiefly from Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov's collection of Russian and Western European paintings and drawings, sculpture, furniture and porcelain; until 1935 the museum occupied his palace.

In 1920–1924 it received 116 Russian works of the 18th to early 20th centuries from Moscow and Leningrad, including portraits by Borovikovsky, Tropinin, Bryullov and Repin, and it bought about 250 paintings by pre-revolutionary artists who worked in Central Asia, such as Kazakov, Karazin and Sommer. From the late 1930s the focus shifted to Uzbek national art, gathered on expeditions across the republic.

The building

After the 1966 earthquake the museum moved temporarily and part of its stores sat in the village of Durmen until 1973. In 1974 a new building by I. Abdulov, A. Nikiforov and S. Rosenblum rose on the site of the old People's House: a plain cube whose facades are divided into squares by a metal frame clad in anodised aluminium, with grey marble at the base and entrance, and glazing on all four sides that gives the galleries an even, diffused light. In July 2026 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of 'Tashkent Modernist Architecture'.