Museum of Fine Arts

About

Bukhara's art museum opened in 1982 and belongs to the Bukhara State Museum-Reserve. It occupies a building put up in 1912 — itself an early twentieth-century monument that housed shops and banking offices long before it housed a collection.

The holdings cover painting, graphic art, sculpture and applied art, and together they trace how the region's visual culture developed. Several rooms are given to Russian painters who worked in Central Asia around the turn of the twentieth century — Pavel Benkov, Mikhail Kurzin, Vladimir Vilkovir. A separate section belongs to the Bukhara school: local painters of the later twentieth century who took the city itself as their subject.

Miniature painting and calligraphy are a particular strength. Works by the reformer and scholar Ahmad Donish are shown alongside those of Sadriddin Pochchaev, People's Artist of Uzbekistan. The display of historic jewellery is worth its own visit: gold and silver ranging from the first century BCE to modern times, set with stones and enamel.

The museum also keeps a research collection of more than 6,000 manuscripts in Arabic script — books and documents of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries in Arabic, Persian-Tajik and Old Uzbek.

The museum takes an active part in the city's cultural calendar, including international projects and the Bukhara Biennale.