Culture Watch: ‘The Desert of Forbidden Art’
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
‘The Desert of Forbidden Art’
Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills
“In my dream I saw a creature, his eyes like the barrels of a gun. I called the painting ‘Fascism Is Advancing,’” says Ed Asner, doing the voice of Yevgeny Lysenko.
Lysenko is just one of many artists to emerge in this documentary as unsung -- and sometimes imprisoned or institutionalized -- heroes of the Stalinist era, artists who bucked the constraints of Social Realism to make artworks that were abstract, anti-fascist or otherwise deemed “degenerate.”
Most valiant of all: Igor Savitsky, the failed artist turned curator who rescued the work of these artists from the trash bin of history and showed them in his remote museum in Nukus, Karakalpakstan, a republic of Uzbekistan.
At Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills from Friday to March 24.
RELATED
More Culture Watch picks from Times writers
-- Jori Finkel
. Credit: Ernest Kurtveliev, from the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art.