page_title: Igor Grabar
section_title: World War II and beyond
hierarchical_section_title: Igor Grabar / Biography / World War II and beyond
caption_attribution_description: English: Corner of Baumanskaya and Radio Streets. Originally the TsAGI building (TsAGI itself is now based out of Moscow). Русский: Угол улиц Радио и Бауманской. Бывшее здание ФГУП ЦАГИ (в настоящее время ЦАГИ расположен за пределами Москвы).
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: 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 Grabar's proposal as a smoke screen: while Grabar's 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 Moscow's 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 Baranovsky's 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 weren't 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 Grabar's 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 Stalin's 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.
caption: Present-day Grabar Institute workshops in Moscow.
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