page_title: Igor Grabar
section_title: Munich
hierarchical_section_title: Igor Grabar / Biography / Munich
caption_attribution_description: "The Fat Women" by Igor Grabar, 1904. According to Grabar's memoirs (in Russian: [1]) in 1898 he obtained an invitation to an exclusive upper-class ball in Paris. The dancers did no impress him, but he was shocked to find one room filled with lavishly dressed middle-aged very very fat women. Grabar wrote that the scene was as fascinating as it was disgusting.
context_page_description: Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar 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.
context_section_description: 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 Stasov's 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 Grabar's interest in architecture, and its history, that soon became his second profession. By 1901, Grabar completed architect's training at the Munich Polytechnicum but did not take the final exams.
caption: The Fat Women (1904)[note 8]
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Software": "ACD Systems Digital Imaging", "Image DateTime": "2008:05:28 11:49:07", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "122", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF SubSecTime": "953", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "688", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "550", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "188"}