Named after the painter Gapar Aitiev, the country's main art museum holds Kyrgyz felt work, embroidery and Saimaluu-Tash petroglyph rubbings on the ground floor; 19th- and 20th-century Russian academic painting on the first floor; and Soviet-era Kyrgyz painters including Semyon Chuikov and Gapar Aitiev himself on the upper floors.
The Soviet halls — endless oils of yurts on green slopes, harvests, and earnest portraits of the working class — are the most interesting, both for what they say about a country trying to imagine itself and for the genuine quality of some of the painters.