State Art Museum of Uzbekistan

The museum's real strength is depth in Central Asian applied art - suzani, ikat silk weaving, carpets and jewelry drawn from nationalized private collections in 1918 - paired with a genuinely broad, if thinner, survey collection of Russian and Western painting built up through transfers from Moscow and Leningrad museums in the 1920s. Its 20th-century Uzbek painting holdings, built deliberately from the 1930s onward, are the most complete record of the formation of a national Uzbek school of painting held in any one collection.

The State Art Museum of Uzbekistan traces its founding to 1918, when the new Soviet administration in Tashkent opened a museum built around roughly a hundred works confiscated from the private collection of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich of Russia, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I who had been exiled to Tashkent decades earlier, together with other nationalized private holdings of paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture and porcelain. It opened first as the Museum of the People's University, was renamed the Central Arts Museum, became the Tashkent Art Museum in 1924, and took its present name, the Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, in 1935.

The collection grew quickly in its first years. Between 1920 and 1924 it received 116 works of Russian and Ukrainian art transferred from collections in Moscow and Leningrad, including portraits by Vladimir Borovikovsky, Karl Bryullov, Ilya Repin, Vasily Tropinin and Nikolai Yaroshenko. Alongside these came roughly 250 paintings by Russian and other artists who had worked in Central Asia before the revolution, among them Nikolay Karazin. From the 1930s the museum began deliberately building a collection of Uzbek painting, acquiring work by Usto Mumin, Pavel Benkov and other founders of the modern Uzbek school, a policy that continued through the Soviet decades with painters such as Ural Tansikboyev. The museum's own account of its holdings today puts the collection at more than 100,000 items and groups of objects.

The museum has not always stood where it stands now. Until 1935 it occupied the former palace of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich; it then moved into the People's House, a building badly damaged in the destructive Tashkent earthquake of 1966 and demolished in 1974. Its replacement, built between 1967 and 1974 to designs by the Soviet architects I. Abdulov, A. K. Nikiforov and S. A. Rosenblum, is the building the museum occupies today at 16 Amir Temur Avenue: a monumental cube divided by a metal-framed grid, faced in aluminium and polished grey marble at street level and glazed above in a bronze-toned glass intended to control the daylight reaching the galleries inside. The building was renovated in 1997.

In July 2026 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, alongside nine other Tashkent buildings from the 1960s to the early 1990s, as part of the World Heritage listing Tashkent Modernist Architecture. Modernity and Tradition in Central Asia - the first time twentieth-century architecture anywhere in Central Asia has been recognised on the List. The other inscribed buildings include the State Museum of the History of Uzbekistan, the Peoples' Friendship Palace and the Alisher Navoi Palace of Arts, giving the museum's own building formal recognition as a landmark of the same late-Soviet modernism its neighbours represent.

The permanent collection is organised into four curatorial departments. National Applied Art of Uzbekistan holds architectural decor, embroidered suzani, hand-woven silk shayi and adras fabrics from Bukhara and Margilan, carpets, copper-stamped metalwork and gold-thread needlework and jewelry, much of it drawn from the nationalized private collections that founded the museum in 1918. Fine Arts of Uzbekistan traces the formation of a national school of painting and graphic art from the early twentieth century through independence, anchored by the artists the museum began collecting from the 1930s. Russian and Western Art spans Russian portraiture, genre and history painting of the 18th to 20th centuries, a dedicated room of Russian icons, and a smaller holding of Western European painting and decorative art from Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England, including seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch cabinet pictures. Far Eastern Art, the museum's department of foreign Oriental art, gathers bronze, porcelain, ivory carving, musical instruments and stone sculpture from China, Japan, Korea, India and Iran.

The Russian and Western department holds the museum's best-known individual paintings: Andrei Belloli's academic nude Bather; Vasily Tropinin's 1845 Portrait of Princess A. A. Obolenskaya; Nikolay Karazin's Orientalist hunting scene Falcon Hunt; Konstantin Makovsky's 1870 genre painting The Catholic Preacher; and a small Flemish cabinet picture, Monkeys as Barbers, painted by David Teniers the Younger in 1659. The Uzbek fine-art rooms carry the museum's own foundational acquisitions of the national school, including Pavel Benkov's 1924-28 Portrait of an Unmarried Tatar Girl and Ural Tansikboyev's 1972 landscape My Song, painted by two of the artists the museum has collected in depth since the 1930s. In applied art, a group of Bukharan and Margilan silk shayi weavings and a large embroidered wall suzani represent the museum's own textile holdings; a number of these pieces were shown on loan at the Savitsky Museum in Nukus, a reminder that the museum's collection travels even though its building does not.

The museum's holdings were the subject of a serious theft case uncovered in the early 2010s. The alarm was first raised in 2012, when the Italian embassy in Tashkent questioned the authenticity of a painting attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese. The investigation that followed found that three former senior museum employees had, between 1999 and 2014, replaced originals with copies and sold the genuine paintings to unknown buyers, working through roughly 25 works from the museum's holdings of European art. On 12 December 2014, a court in Tashkent sentenced the museum's former senior curator, Mirfaizi Usmanov, to nine years and three months in prison; the former head of the museum's restoration laboratory, Bakhtiyor Botirov, and a restorer, Abdurakhmon Muranov, each received eight-year sentences. It is the reason a number of paintings a visitor sees on the walls today are acknowledged copies rather than the originals the museum once held, and visitors who ask about individual works sometimes still hear the story.

The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, 09:00 to 18:00, and is closed on Mondays, on its own published schedule. It sits on Amir Temur Avenue in central Tashkent, a short walk from the Amir Temur Xiyoboni metro station. Visitors consistently describe a visit of two to three hours to cover all four departments, and most reviews single out the applied-art rooms - suzani, carpets, jewelry - as the section not to miss, alongside a recurring complaint about thin labelling in some galleries.

The museum is not the only art institution taking shape in Tashkent. Since 2020, Uzbekistan's Art and Culture Development Foundation has been developing plans for a large new building on a site nearby, between the Abul Qasim Madrasah, the Peoples' Friendship Palace and the Alisher Navoi monument, with an architectural concept by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and exhibition design by the German studio Atelier Brueckner. Early reporting in 2020 described the project as a new building for the State Art Museum itself; when construction broke ground in August 2025, the same foundation was presenting it under a different name, the National Museum of Uzbekistan, intended to show both the country's national holdings and newly acquired work, and due to open in March 2028. What relationship the finished National Museum of Uzbekistan will have to the State Art Museum's own collection and its landmark 1974 building on Amir Temur Avenue has not been stated publicly in the sources available for this page, and is worth checking again as the new building nears completion.

Visitors consistently describe a large, wide-ranging collection spread over several floors that rewards two to three hours, and single out the Uzbek applied-art rooms - suzani, carpets, jewelry - as the strongest section. The most repeated complaint is thin object labelling and a number of paintings that are acknowledged copies standing in for originals, some lost in the 2014 theft case, with a handful of visitors also noting poor lighting in individual rooms and early closing cutting a visit short.