Grabar, Igor

Grabar, Igor (1871–1960). Hungarian-born Russian painter, art historian, and administrator. He was born in Budapest and studied in St Petersburg (first law at the university, then art at the Academy). From 1896 to 1901 he lived in Munich, and he travelled extensively in Europe and Russia up to the time of the 1917 Revolution. Early in his career as an artist he worked mainly as a landscapist, and Alan Bird (A History of Russian Painting, 1987) comments that he ‘was one of the first Russian painters to take over the manner and the palette of Impressionism, producing some extremely sensitive scenes of the landscape under snow’ (September Snow, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1903). Grabar continued to paint throughout his life, his work including portraits of some of his distinguished contemporaries, but after the Revolution he became better known as a scholar and administrator (even before this, in 1913, he had been appointed director of the Tretyakov Gallery, a post he held until 1925). He was a professor of art history at Moscow University until 1946 and also held important posts in the state establishments for art restoration and scientific research in art history. In these varied roles he did much to preserve his country's artistic heritage. His writings included numerous books and articles on Russian art, including a two-volume monograph on Repin (1937, 2nd edn., 1963–4), for which he was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941, and he was editor of the standard work Istoriya russkogo iskusstva (‘History of Russian Art', 6 vols., 1906–16) and co-editor of the revised and expanded version (13 vols., 1953–68). His autobiography appeared in 1937. Alan Bird writes that ‘Grabar's career is an interesting example of survival in the face of official hostility without any ostensible sacrifice of personal principles. He opposed the Futurists who wanted to destroy the art of the past, as did many of the Constructivists; he defied the Soviets by returning confiscated pictures to their aristocratic or bourgeois owners … and he defied the Communist Party whose ideologists found his work lacking in partiinost [Party spirit]; and yet always acted without malice or self-interest.’