Art in Exile.(Soviet era dissident art featured at Nukus Museum)

On the wall of the Nukus Museum, a crazed-looking bull with pointed horns stares out at visitors. The picture was painted by a man named Lysenko. Art historians don't know his first name, or much else about him--except that he was forced to enter a Soviet mental institution for his depiction of that bull. After all, it doesn't conform to the Soviet straitjacket style of "socialist realism"; the bull is light blue. Hanging nearby is a masterful, gentle painting by Mikhail Kurzin simply entitled "Dumplings." But that work isn't as innocuous as it first appears, either. When Kurzin painted his mouthwatering rendition of the traditional Russian dish pelmeni, he had just been released from prison and was in exile, suffering from malnutrition. He painted each dumpling with loving care, using hard brushes and low-quality paints, because he was desperate to eat them.

Nearly all the gulag-era works in the museum share a similarly wrenching story. And there are more than 30,000 of them, largely unseen examples of Soviet avant-garde and unofficial art tucked away in a dilapidated two-story building in Nukus, the site of a former chemical- weapons plant, on the edge of the Uzbek desert in Central Asia. The vast majority of the paintings are stacked by the thousands in the museum's basement; the rest are packed tightly on the walls of dim rooms. Museum workers lay trays of tap water on the floors to maintain humidity. "They have nothing resembling what we would call climate control," says Washington-based art historian Ori Soltes. That may soon change: in an effort to give the museum more visibility--and perhaps an infusion of cash--Soltes is arranging for the exhibit's first tour through the major cities of Europe and the United States, sometime in the next 18 months.

There is plenty to show off. The tiny museum boasts the most comprehensive collection of dissident art from the Soviet era. Some of the artists widely represented in Nukus--like Ivan Kudryashov and Lubov Popova--have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York. Paintings by Popova, for example, go for $300,000 in the West. At Nukus, there are seven examples of her work.

Even so, on a typical day, there are no visitors. It's not hard to see why: the museum can barely pay its electricity and telephone bills. Paint is peeling off the walls, and the ceilings are cracked. The bathroom is a wooden outhouse. The workers--mostly a small army of dedicated women who earn $10 per month--take turns arriving at 6 a.m. to open windows and add water to the cafeteria-tray humidifiers. They rely on intermittent international grants, and sales of local Karakalpak carpets, for income.

So why keep the collection in Uzbekistan? For one, that's where many of the artists did their work. Uzbekistan was far away from the prying eyes of the Stalin regime. "Of course we realize that Nukus is very provincial," says museum director Marinika Babanazarova. "Only here would such a museum ever appear." Nukus was also the adopted home of the Soviet-era artist and collector Igor Savitsky, who spent his life gathering thousands of works destined for destruction or obscurity. Many of them had been smuggled out of the gulag, and stored by the artists' families and friends. "Some called Savitsky 'the garbageman' because of his collecting," says Babanazarova. "They laughed at him. They didn't understand what he was doing. Nobody cared about these paintings. He found them in basements, in attics, on trash heaps, under beds or just rolled up in the corner."

Savitsky began gathering the art in the 1930s, when most of it was considered illegal. After Lenin's death in 1924, experimenting with such ...