Moscow
Igor Grabar worked in  which location from 1903 to 1960?
Igor Grabar Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar ( , 25 March 1871 in Budapest – 16 May 1960 in Moscow ) was a Russian post-impressionist painter , publisher , restorer and historian of art . Grabar , descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family , was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich . He reached his peak in painting in 1903–1907 and was notable for a peculiar divisionist painting technique bordering on pointillism and his rendition of snow . By the end of 1890s , Grabar had established himself as an art critic . In 1902 , he joined Mir Iskusstva , although his relations with its leaders Sergei Diaghilev and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky were far from friendly . In 1910–1915 , Grabar edited and published his opus magnum , the History of Russian Art . The History employed the finest artists and critics of the period ; Grabar personally wrote the issues on architecture that set an unsurpassed standard of understanding and presenting the subject . Concurrently , he wrote and published a series of books on contemporary and historic Russian painters . In 1913 , he was appointed executive director of the Tretyakov Gallery and launched an ambitious reform program that continued until 1926 . Grabar diversified the Tretyakov collection into modern art and in 1917 published its first comprehensive catalogue . In 1921 Grabar became the first professor of Art restoration at the Moscow State University . An experienced politician , Grabar stayed at the top of the Soviet art establishment until his death , excluding a brief voluntary retirement in 1933–1937 . He managed art-restoration workshops ( present-day Grabar Centre ) during 1918–1930 and from 1944 to 1960 . Grabar took active part in redistribution of former church art nationalized by the Bolsheviks and established new museums for the confiscated treasures . In 1943 , he formulated the Soviet doctrine of compensating World War II losses with art looted in Germany . After the war , he personally advised Joseph Stalin on the preservation of architectural heritage . Biography . Family roots . Emmanuil Hrabar ( 1830–1910 ) , father of Igor Grabar and his older brothers Bela and Vladimir ( the future law scholar , 1865–1956 ) , was an ethnic Rusyn lawyer and a politician of pro-Russian orientation . He was elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1869 , at the same time , maintaining ties with slavophiles in Moscow and the Russian Embassy . Olga Hrabar ( 1843–1930 ) , mother of Igor and Vladimir , was a daughter of Rusyn pro-Russian , anti-Catholic politician Adolph Dobryansky ( 1817–1901 ) . According to Igor Grabars memoirs , Dobryansky ran an underground network of obedient followers . Dobryansky and his group , unaware of the realities of living in the Russian Empire , leaned to its official doctrine of Orthodoxy , Autocracy , and Nationality ; Dobryansky , a man of wealth and pedigree , even imitated the lifestyle of a Russian landlord in minute details ; two of his sons joined Imperial Russian service . Dobryansky praised the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 by Russian troops , dreaded by his own Rusyn peasants . In the early 1870s , the Hungarian government forced Emmanuil Hrabar to leave the country . Olga with children stayed under police surveillance at the Dobryansky manor in Čertižné ( now in Slovakia ) . In 1880 , the Hrabars temporarily reunited in Russia . Emmanuil passed qualification test to teach German and French and settled with Igor and Vladimir in Yegoryevsk . Olga returned to Hungary to continue pro-Russian propaganda ; in 1882 she and her father were , at last , arrested for treason and brought to a trial that aroused public suspicion of a police provocation . She was acquitted for lack of evidence and emigrated to Russia for the rest of her life . In Russia , the Hrabars lived under nom de guerre Hrabrov ; Igor Grabar restored his real surname ( transliterated from Russian with a G , unlike his brother Vladimir Hrabar ) in the early 1890s . Education . Grabar ( then Hrabrov ) attended high school in Yegoryevsk , where his father taught foreign languages . The stream of magazine publications that followed the 1881 murder of Alexander II of Russia gave him the first impetus to draw . In 1882 , the Hrabars ( Hrabrovs ) relocated to Kiev , closer to the continuing trial of their mother and grandfather ; later in the same year , Emmanuil Hrabar accepted an appointment to Izmail . He sent Igor to Mikhail Katkovs boarding school in Moscow ; the schoolmaster waived tuition fee to a fellow slavophile . Igor Grabar , interested in drawing , soon made contacts with the students of the Moscow School of Painting , Sculpture and Architecture and already established artists - Abram Arkhipov , Vasily Polenov and the Schukins , wealthy patrons of art . Strapped for cash , he painted portraits of fellow students for a fee . In 1889 , Grabar was admitted to the Law Department of the Saint Petersburg University ; he made living by selling short stories to magazines and soon became the editor of Shut , the weakest of humour magazines that nevertheless paid well . His illustrations to books by Nikolay Gogol , signed Igor Hrabrov , inspired the young Aleksandr Gerasimov ( born 1881 ) , but Grabar generally stayed aside from drawing . He later complained that tabloid bohemianism completely overwhelmed him . In his second year at the university , Grabar moved up to the respectable Niva magazine . He selected graphics for Niva and wrote essays on contemporary painters but did not yet have enough influence to change its policies . Law-department classes were uninspiring and Grabar spent more time attending history lectures and Pavel Chistyakovs school of painting , but he still managed to graduate in law , without delay , in April 1893 . In the end of 1894 , he enrolled in Ilya Repins class at the Imperial Academy of Arts that has just been radically reformed . His classmates , the first spendid post-reform group , included Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin who introduced him to French Impressionism , Konstantin Bogaevsky , Oleksandr Murashko , Nicholas Roerich and Arkady Rylov . Filipp Malyavin , Konstantin Somov , Dmitry Kardovsky also studied alongside Grabar but were admitted earlier . Grabar remained a fervent admirer of Repin for life but became quickly dissatisfied with academic studies and in July 1895 left for a brief study tour of Western Europe financed by Niva magazine . Munich . His return to Saint Petersburg finally persuaded him to drop out of the Academy ; in May 1896 , he and Kardovsky left for Munich via Berlin and Paris ; Jawlensky and Werefkin joined them later in summer . They enrolled at a private school of painting run by Anton Ažbe . Grabar , who soon became assistant to Ažbe , rated him as a poorly gifted painter , a superb draftsman and an outstanding teacher . Two years later , when Grabar was ready to leave Ažbe , he was offered an opportunity to open his own , competing , school ; Ažbe made a counter-offer , making Grabar his equal partner . The partnership existed for less than a year , from June 1899 until spring of 1900 , when Grabar accepted a lucrative offer from Prince Shcherbatov and left Munich . Grabar kept close ties with Saint Petersburg artists and publishers . In January–February 1897 , Grabar , obliged to write for Niva , published an article defending avant-garde art against Vladimir Stasov , making a bombshell effect and inadvertently provoking Stasovs campaign against Repin as the dean of the Academy . Another article published in 1899 caused a conflict between Ilya Repin and Mir iskusstva . Life in Munich also aroused Grabars interest in architecture , and its history , that soon became his second profession . By 1901 , Grabar completed architects training at the Munich Polytechnicum but did not take the final exams . Mir Iskusstva . In 1901–1902 , Grabar presented twelve of his paintings at an exhibition hosted by Mir Iskusstva ; these were the first truly French impressionist works displayed in Russia by a Russian painter . One painting went straight to Tretyakov Gallery , others were auctioned to private collections . 1903–1907 became Grabars highest point in painting ; according to Grabars Autobiography , the summit ( February–April 1904 ) coincided with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War . In this season , he practiced moderate divisionism with elements of pointillist technique . Three paintings of this period that Grabar himself considered seminal ( February Glaze , March Snow and Piles of Snow ) garnered wide and generally positive critical response . Kazimir Malevich wrote that , had it not been for linear perspective that Grabar preserved in his March Snow as a remnant of narrative from the nineteenth century , the whole picture would blend in a uniform painterly texture without clearly defined front and middle planes . In 1905 , Grabar travelled to Paris to study the new works of French postimpressionists and changed his technique in favor of complete separation of colours . Incidentally , although Grabar appreciated and studied Cézanne , Gauguin and Van Gogh , he himself ranked the king of painters Diego Velázquez above them all . At the end of 1905 and the beginning of 1906 , when Moscow was burning from riots and shellfire , Grabar tackled another challenging subject , frost , at the same time investing more and more time into writing and editing . Snow , and winter in general , remained his favorite subjects for life . Relations between Grabar and the founders of Mir Iskusstva were strained . Sergei Diaghilev tolerated Grabar as a business asset but feared and distrusted him as a potential new leader of the movement ; Grabar financial backing provided by Shcherbatov seemed especially menacing . Diaghilevs sycophants Nurok and Nouvelle led the opposition , Eugene Lansere and Konstantin Somov followed suit ; Valentin Serov was perhaps the only member who treated Grabar with sympathy . Grabar , indeed , used funds of Shcherbatov and Nadezhda von Meck to launch his own short-lived art society that failed to shake Mir Iskusstva and soon fell apart . Memoirs of the period , although biased , indicate that Grabar himself was a difficult person . According to Alexander Benois , Grabar practiced an unacceptably patronizing tone and at the same time , had absolutely no sense of humour . No one questioned his talent and encyclopedic knowledge , but Grabar was unable to persuade people or barely coexist with them in small communities like Mir Iskusstva . As a result , in 1908 Grabar broke with the movement completely and tried , in vain , to launch his own art magazine . Grabars History . In the same 1908 , Grabar abandoned painting in favor of writing ; he became chief editor and writer for Joseph Knebels series of books on Russian artists and Russian towns . He quickly amassed a wealth of historic evidence and settled on publishing a comprehensive History of Russian Art . Grabar initially concentrated on project management alone , leaving principal writing to Alexander Benois , but when the latter stepped aside in May , Grabar was compelled to pick up the writing task . He now concentrated on architecture ; only then did he realize that Russian architecture of the 18th century and earlier periods had never been properly studied . Grabar locked himself in the archives to study the subject for a year ; in July 1909 he took a short leave from writing and designed the Palladian Zakharyin Hospital in present-day Khimki , which was completed by the onset of World War I and operates to date . The first issue of History was printed in 1910 ; publication ceased with the 23rd issue in the beginning of 1915 when Knebels printshop and Grabars archive stored there were burnt in an anti-German pogrom . Of 2,630 pages in History , 650—the issues on architecture—were written by Grabar . History amalgamated works by the leading architects , artists and critics of the period . Ivan Bilibin , who contributed photography of vernacular architecture , used to say that we started appreciating old architecture only after Grabars book . Grabars own memoirs , however , focus on the failures of his co-authors : of all contributors only Fyodor Gornostayev was commended for doing his part . Grabars predecessors did not elaborate how art , and especially architecture fitted into the grand historical scheme ; his History became the first comprehensive work that attempted to solve the task . Grabar , accepting now-standard periodization of Russian history , applied the same scheme to history of architecture and emphasized the role of individual monarchs in it . His view of the transition from Naryshkin Baroque , the summit of Muscovite architecture , into loaned European Petrine Baroque as an organic process , however , was contentious from the start , and , according to James Cracraft , could not account for an abrupt demise of national architecture under Peter I and his successors . His own concept of Moscow Baroque , probably influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin , is not entirely consistent or clear . Soviet historians retained Grabars overall scheme , sealing the persistent lack of a clear and consistent , architecturally configured periodization of Russian architectural history. . Grabars concept of Moscow Baroque was challenged , his Ukrainian Baroque was trashed , yet Belarusian Baroque became a fixture of Soviet scholarship . Grabars understanding of lesser phenomena has been , at times , erroneous and his attributions were later dismissed . For example , he based the description of the 1591 Ambassadors Prikaz building on a fanciful and grossly distorted sketch by a Swede who visited Moscow after the building was torn down and replaced with a new one . His attribution and periodization of Menshikov Tower is also challenged . Nevertheless , James Cracraft ranked Grabar the first in the whole field of Russian art history , Dmitry Shvidkovsky wrote that Grabars History in whole remains unsurpassed , and William Craft Brumfield noted its immense importance for the preservation of medieval heritage . Tretyakov Gallery . On 2 April 1913 , the Board of the Tretyakov Gallery elected Grabar its trustee and executive director . He accepted the appointment on condition that the trustees give him unlimited authority in reforming the gallery . Later , he wrote that had he known the weight of this burden beforehand he would step back , but , inexperienced in public politics , he grabbed the opportunity of being there , among the subject of his History . Grabar planned to expand the former private collection into a comprehensive showcase of national art , including the controversial Russian and French modernist paintings . He laid out a program of artistic , scientific , educational-enlightening and social changes and eventually converted the gallery into a European museum . Grabar started with rearranging the paintings in public display ; when the gallery reopened in December 1913 , the main enfilade of its second floor was prominently terminated with Vasily Surikovs epic Feodosia Morozova . The first floor was now filled with completely new material - contemporary French painters and young Russians like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Martiros Saryan . In the beginning of 1915 , Grabars purchasing decisions stirred a public scandal that involved practically all publicly known artists ; Victor Vasnetsov , Mikhail Nesterov , Vladimir Makovsky and Grabars former sponsor Shcherbatov called for immediate termination of his tenure . Debates continued until January 1916 , when Moscow City Hall approved Grabars reform in full . Grabar summarized his achievements in the 1917 catalogue of the Gallery , the first of its kind . The Russian Revolution of 1917 had dual effect on the gallery . Collapse of the monetary system and city utilities brought the gallery to a really catastrophic condition that was barely improved by nationalization in June 1918 . At the same time the gallery collection rapidly grew , absorbing nationalized private and church collections and formerly independent small museums . One by one its own exhibition halls were converted into art warehouses and closed to the public . By 1924 , the gallery operated four affiliate halls , in 1925 it disposed with foreign masters , but these measures could not offset the inflow of new stock . Physical expansion of the building became a first priority , and in 1926 Grabar was replaced with architect Aleksey Shchusev . Thriving under the Bolsheviks . In 1918 , Grabar took the lead of the Museums and Preservation Section of the Soviet Government , the Museum Fund and the Moscow-based state restoration workshops , becoming de facto chief curator of arts and architectural heritage for the whole Moscow region . As prescribed by the Bolsheviks in December 1918 , Grabars institutions catalogued all known heritage , an action tantamount to confiscation , and despite continuing war many nationalized landmarks were actually restored . Grabars group , like the contemporary Gorky Commission , was torn by a conflict of preservationists ( Grabar , Alexander Benois , Alexander Chayanov , Pyotr Baranovsky ) and destroyers ( David Shterenberg , Vladimir Tatlin ) and Grabar later complained that he had to offset two extremes , destruction of heritage and obstruction of avant-garde artists ( he was himself the main exponent of conservation ) . Grabar successfully exploited whatever allies he could recruit amongst the ambivalent Soviet bureaucracy , starting with the Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky , and even managed to retain his affluent lifestyle of the past . From 1919 , Grabar directed his commission into documenting and preserving Orthodox church murals and icons . The first 1919 expedition to Yaroslavl located and restored previously unknown works of the 12th and 13th centuries . Restorers Fyodor Modorov , Grigory Chirikov and photographer A . V . Lyadov continued studies of northern church art throughout the 1920s and by 1926 produced the first comprehensive study of icons and an assessment of wooden churches that housed them . Grabars icon restoration workshop became internationally known ; Alfred H . Barr , Jr . who visited Moscow in 1927–1928 , wrote of Grabars technology with great enthusiasm . It is to Grabar , more than to any other single scholar , that Russia owes the rediscovery of his icons . These appointments inevitably placed Grabar near the top of the Soviet machine of confiscating church and , to a lesser extent , privately held art treasures . Benois , who left the country , scorned Grabar for ripping Princess Mescherskaya of her Botticelli . Grabar accepted the fact of Bolshevik expropriation and concentrated on preservation of the treasures and setting up local museums to display them in public . His and Roman Kleins proposal to convert the whole Moscow Kremlin into a public museum failed , and the Kremlin was quickly taken over by the sprawling Red government . Among the masterpieces found during these campaigns was The Madonna of Tagil ( Madonna del Popolo ) taken from the Demidov house and attributed by Grabar to Raphael . Most , however , ended up at overseas auctions . Less formal attempts of individual artists to raise money in the United States failed : the 1924 show in New York City attracted 17 thousand visitors but raised only $30,000 and Grabar admitted We do not know what to do . 1930s . In 1930 , Grabar left all his administrative , academic and editorial jobs , even that of an editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia , and concentrated on painting . Grabar himself wrote : I had to choose between the daily mounting administrative burden and creating .. . I had no choice . A personal pension granted by Sovnarkom hastened my retirement . According to Baranovsky and Khlebnikova , the decision was influenced by his mothers death ; Grabar the artist shifted his attention to problems of age , aging and death . According to Colton , the change followed a campaign of demolition inside the Kremlin ( Chudov Monastery ) and all over Moscow . The preservationist Old Moscow Society , unable to influence the authorities any longer , voted itself out of existence , and Grabars heritage commission was disbanded a few months later . Grabars influence over impending demolitions was now reduced to writing pleas to Stalin , as was the case of the Sukharev Tower in 1933–1934 . Grabar supervised another New York exhibition , this time of icon art , in 1931 and painted a string of official socialist realism epics but it was the 1933 Portrait of Svetlana that gave him an enormous and unwanted exposure at home and abroad . Grabar himself rated this portrait , painted in one day , among its best . The public identified its title subject as none other than Stalins daughter ( born in 1926 , she could not have been Grabars subject ; the legend persisted into the 1960s ) . Either this dangerous publicity , or his earlier association with Natalia Sedova and other trotskyists compelled Grabar to retire to relative obscurity . He kept on painting and wrote his Autobiography that was ready for print in June 1935 but was barred from publication until March 1937 . Contrary to the communist policy , Autobiography appreciated the formalist art of Mir Iskusstva and dismissed some critics applying Marxist analysis as utterly incompetent . In the same 1937 Grabar published Ilya Repin that earned him the State Prize four years later and began writing Serov . By 1940 , he was firmly back into the Soviet establishment and was featured in propagandist newsreels produced for distribution in Nazi Germany . World War II and beyond . In June 1943 , Grabar proposed tit-for-tat compensation of Soviet art treasures destroyed in World War II with art to be taken from Germany . Compiling the target list of German treasures was easy , but estimating own losses was not : by March 1946 , only nine out of forty major museums could provide an inventory of their losses . The government used Grabars proposal as a smoke screen : while Grabars deputy Victor Lazarev was discussing the legality of equitable reparations with the Allies , Soviet trophy brigades had practically completed a wholesale campaign of organized looting . Grabar consulted Joseph Stalin in preparation to Moscows 800-years jubilee celebrated in 1947 . He persuaded Stalin to return the former St . Andronik Monastery , once converted to a prison , if not to the church but to the artistic community . The remains of the monastery , restored by Pyotr Baranovsky , became the Andrey Rublyov Museum of Old Russian Art ( Grabar upheld Baranovskys dubious discovery of the alleged tomb of Andrey Rublyov ) . Grabar , as the senior in artistic community , retained some independence from the ideological pressure , as indicated by his 1945 obituary for the emigre Leonid Pasternak printed in Soviet Art . Things werent always smooth : in 1948 Grabar was caught in another campaign against random targets in art and science . He retained his administrative and university jobs and in 1954 co-authored Russian architecture of the first half of the 18th century , a revisionist study of the period that dismissed the knowledge collected by fellow historians before 1917 . He made an exception , though , for his own works that allegedly correctly understood the subject . Contrary to Grabars own understanding of East-West cultural relationship presented in History but in line with the rules of Soviet historiography , the new book claimed that Russians of the 18th century yield nothing in their work to foreign contemporaries and overstated the influence of folk tradition on polite architecture . These falsified theories , easily dismissed today , established the provincial outlook that governed the post-war generation of Soviet art historians . After Stalins death , Grabar was the first to publicly denounce run-off-the-mill socialist realism and pay the dues to once banished Aristarkh Lentulov and Pyotr Konchalovsky . The unsinkable Grabar earned derogatory nicknames Ugor Obmanuilovich ( cheating eel ) and Irod Graber ( Herod the Robber ) . Baranovsky and Khlebnikova noted that the reaction against Grabar was frequently provoked by his work at the helm of museum purchasing committees : mediocre artists inevitably had a grudge against his buying and pricing decisions . References . - Sources - Akinsha , Konstantin ; Kozlov , Grigorii ; Hochfield , Sylvia ( 2006 ) . Beautiful loot : the Soviet plunder of Europes art treasures . Random House . . - Akinsha , Konstantin ; Kozlov , Grigorii ( 2000 , in Russian ) . Diplomaticheskie debaty po povodu restitutsii kulturnykh tsennostei v 1945-1946 ( Дипломатические дебаты по поводу реституции культурных ценностей в 1945-1946 ) . Cultural Map of Europe : Proceedings of the conference , 10–11 April 2000 , Moscow . - Baranovsky , Victor ; Khlebnikova , Irina ( 2001 ) ( in Russian ) . Anton Ažbe i hudozhniki Rossii ( Антон Ажбе и художники России ) . Moscow State University . . - Barnes , Christopher ( 2004 ) . Boris Pasternak : A Literary Biography . Cambridge University Press . . - Brown , Matthew Cullerne ; Taylor , Brandon ( 1993 ) . Art of the Soviets : painting , sculpture , and architecture in a one-party state , 1917-1992 . Manchester University Press ND . - Brumfield , William Craft ( 1991 ) . The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture . Berkeley : University of California Press . - Brumfield , William Craft ( 1995 ) . Lost Russia : photographing the ruins of Russian architecture . Duke University Press . . - Crone , Rainer ; Moos , David ( 2004 ) . Kazimir Malevich : The Climax of Disclosure . Reaktion Books . . - Eisenstein , Sergey . Yermolova , in : Efimova , Alla ; Manovich , Lev ( editors ) ( 1993 ) . Tekstura : Russian essays on visual culture . University of Chicago Press . . pp . 10–36 . The publication is an excerpt from Eisensteins draft of Montage , written in the 1930s and first printed in English in 1991 . - Feldbrugge , Ferdinand Joseph Maria ; Berg , Gerard Pieter van den Berg ; Simons , William B . ( 1985 ) . Encyclopedia of Soviet law . BRILL . . - Grabar , Igor ( 2001 ) . Autobiography ( Автомонография ) ( in Russian ) . Respublika , Moscow . . The book was originally published in 1937 . - Golenkevich , Nina ( 2007 , in Russian ) . Iz istorii restravratsionnogo dela v Yaroslavle ( Из истории реставрационного дела в Ярославле ( 1920-е годы ) ) . Yaroslavl Museum of Art . - History of the Tretyakov Gallery . Ch . IV : The Gallery after Tretyakov : 1898-1918 . Tretyakov Gallery . Retrieved 2010-02-04 . - History of the Tretyakov Gallery . Ch . V : Treasure of the Republic : 1918-1941 . Tretyakov Gallery . Retrieved 2010-02-04 . - History of the Tretyakov Gallery . Igor Grabar ( in Russian ) . Tretyakov Gallery . Retrieved 2010-02-04 . - Kantor , Sybil Gordon ( 2003 ) . Alfred H . Barr , Jr . and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art . MIT Press . . - Kelley , Stephen J . ( 2000 ) . Wood structures : a global forum on the treatment , conservation , and repair of cultural heritage . ASTM International . . - Magocsi , Paul R. ; Pop , Ivan ( 2002 ) . Encyclopedia of Rusyn history and culture . University of Toronto Press . . Article credit : Ivan Pop . - Pyman , Avril ( 1994 ) . A history of Russian symbolism . Cambridge University Press . . - Shvidkovsky , Dmitry ( 2007 ) . Russian architecture and the West . Yale University Press . . - Sternin , Grigory . Public and artist in Russia at the turn of the century , in : Efimova , Alla ; Manovich , Lev ( editors ) ( 1993 ) . Tekstura : Russian essays on visual culture . University of Chicago Press . . pp . 89–103 . Sternins article was originally published in Russian in 1984 . - Stites , Richard ( 1991 ) . Revolutionary Dreams : Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution . Oxford University Press US . .