The four floors of the Fine Arts Museum of Uzbekistan walk you through 1500 years of art in Uzbekistan, from 7th-century Buddhist relics, to the art of pre-Russian Turkestan, to Soviet realism, to contemporary works. There are displays of East Asian and South Asian art and even a few 19th-century paintings of second-tier Russian and European artists hanging about. Nineteenth- and 20th-century Central Asian masters are well represented, and there’s an impressive section on Uzbek applied art – notably some brilliant old plaster carvings (ghanch) and the silk-on-cotton embroidered hangings called suzani .
