page_title: Igor Grabar
section_title: Tretyakov Gallery
hierarchical_section_title: Igor Grabar / Biography / Tretyakov Gallery
caption_attribution_description: Group portrait with cornflowers (Васильки. Групповой портрет), 1914
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: On April 2, 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 Surikov's 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 Grabar's purchasing decisions stirred a public scandal that involved practically all publicly known artists; Victor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov, Vladimir Makovsky and Grabar's former sponsor Shcherbatov called for immediate termination of his tenure. Debates continued until January 1916, when Moscow City Hall approved Grabar's 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.
caption: Grabar's wife, her sister and cornflowers, 1914.
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