Usto Mumin

Aleksandr Nikolayev was born into a noble family. In his memoirs he described his father as an ardent art enthusiast and his mother as a gifted pianist. As a youth, Nikolayev took lessons in classical drawing. Around the same time, he became aware that he liked “strong and tanned” men.¹ Inspired by leftist ideas, he enrolled on Kazimir Malevich’s course at the Open Art Studios in 1919, but several months later was drafted into the military and sent to the Civil War frontline. After the war, he headed to Turkestan to “revolutionize art [...] as a Bolshevik artist.”² On his way to Turkestan Nikolayev spent half a year in Orenburg, where he “got carried away and married,” but the marriage fell apart and he travelled to Tashkent in 1920 and then, several months later, to Samarkand.

In 1939, describing his arrival in Central Asia, Nikolayev wrote, “I knew [...] the famous story of the French artist Paul Gauguin, who spent seven years on the island of Tahiti living with the local tribes and taking part in their rites and customs. [...] I thought I would repeat his experiment.” Nikolayev lived differently to others within the community of Russian artists in Samarkand. He settled in a Muslim neighborhood (or mahalla), quickly learnt the basics of the Uzbek language, converted to Islam, and took the name Usto Mumin (Faithful Master), which he also used as his artist’s pseudonym.

Rather than “revolutionizing” local art,” the “Bolshevik artist” began to adapt to the local culture. He produced his first artworks around eighteen months after starting his new life in Samarkand. Mumin was a member of the informal circle of artists that gathered around Daniil Stepanov (1921– 1924) based on a shared interest in Italy and specifically the Quattrocento. In Mumin’s work the collective project of the group found its ultimate visual and thematic expression. He brought together elements of the Italian Quattrocento with those of Persian miniatures and Russian icons, supplementing this combination with androgynous motifs. The images were inspired by bacha bazi, the culture of dancing boys, whose theatrical performances were an important part of Samarkand rituals. The cycle featured a subliminal narrative: all of the paintings revolved around a love story between two young men from the Muslim community.