MOSCOW - A museum in the parched hinterland of Uzbekistan had been known chiefly to journalists and art lovers who returned from the remote city of Nukus with a dazed look and a remarkable tale, as if they had stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave.

Now “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” an American-made documentary, is trying to draw international attention to the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art and how it is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Russian avant-garde art.

But late last year Uzbek officials abruptly gave the museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its two exhibition buildings . The building has since stood empty, and more than 2,000 works are no longer on view.

The museum’s director, Marinika M. Babanazarova, who has fiercely guarded the collection for 27 years, was not permitted to travel to the United States and said staff members have undergone 15 government audits, in which they have repeatedly been asked to explain their travels overseas and contacts with foreigners.

“We have to prove that we are doing something good for the country, that we are not a gang of bandits,” said Ms. Babanazarova, 55 . “It’s a great satisfaction that we are getting international recognition. On the other hand, it complicates our lives .”

In the 1990s, when Westerners first happened upon the museum, it seemed like the beginning of an art-world fairy tale. Hanging in crude frames were works that ran the gamut of early-20thcentury styles, from Fauvism to Futurism and Constructivism. The collection chronicled the mostly forgotten Soviet artists who explored new directions before the early 1930s, when Stalin condemned “decadent bourgeois art” in favor of paintings of workers.

Some of the artists complied; some were locked up; their work wound up in attics and storerooms. It might have remained there except for Igor V. Savitsky, an obsessive collector . He persuaded the artists’ families to entrust him with the canvases and carried them back in massive rolls to Nukus, the city he made his home after visiting it as part of an archaeological expedition.

“It’s an extraordinary collection because it really does tell the story of the twilight zone of the Russian avantgarde,” said John E. Bowlt, director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

In 1998, a group of 85 artists and scholars chartered a flight from New York to see the collection. Curators in Germany and France arranged to exhibit parts of it in Europe, and museums in the United States and Russia seemed to be next in line.

“The collectors from the West started to come in their private planes, bringing bags of money, showing this to us,” Ms. Babanazarova told the filmmakers. “Of course, they had very good taste, we understood this immediately - they wanted the best pieces.”

Her friends urged her to sell a few paintings, if only to provide better conditions for the rest of the collection. But Ms. Babanazarova refused, partly out of fear that one sale would prompt the government to auction off the best works.

More than a dozen years later the collection remains intact. But it also remains mostly hidden from the public. The Uzbek Ministry of Culture has consistently refused invitations to display the collection overseas .

There has been no clear explanation for this policy.

Uzbek authorities have shown bursts of support for the collection. In 2003 President Islam A. Karimov himself came to Nukus to inaugurate a new museum building, and Mr. Savitsky received a posthumous state honor.

Museum supporters say they have no idea what the government is planning now.

“The Desert of Forbidden Art,” directed by Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev, outlines various threats facing the collection . The directors said they especially worried about what would happen without the efforts of Ms. Babanazarova, whom Uzbek officials continued to question repeatedly.

Ms. Babanazarova speculated that officials’ wariness might simply reflect the nagging strangeness of the Savitsky story .

“They don’t believe it - that some oddball Savitsky put it together, and then a new group of oddballs are preserving the collection,” she said. “Something about it doesn’t make sense to some officials.”


By ELLEN BARRY