Igor Grabar
Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich.
[note 1] 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.
Emmanuil Hrabar (1830–1910), father of Igor Grabar and his older brothers Bela[note 2][dubious – discuss] and Vladimir (the future law scholar, 1865–1956), was an ethnic Rusyn lawyer and a politician of pro-Russian orientation.
[3][7] Olga returned to Hungary to continue pro-Russian propaganda;[9] in 1882 she and her father were, at last, arrested for treason[5] and brought to a trial that aroused public suspicion of a police provocation.
[12] 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.
[18] His illustrations to books by Nikolay Gogol, signed Igor Hrabrov, inspired the young Aleksandr Gerasimov (born 1881),[19] but Grabar generally stayed aside from drawing.
[21] Law-department classes were uninspiring and Grabar spent more time attending history lectures[22] and Pavel Chistyakov's school of painting,[23] but he still managed to graduate in law, without delay, in April 1893.
[29] 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.
[37] 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.
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.
[42] 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.
[46][note 9] Diaghilev's sycophants Nurok and Nouvelle led the opposition,[46] Eugene Lansere and Konstantin Somov followed suit; Valentin Serov was perhaps the only member who treated Grabar with sympathy.
[45] Grabar, indeed, used funds of Shcherbatov and Nadezhda von Meck to launch his own short-lived art society[47] that failed to shake Mir Iskusstva and soon fell apart.
[38] 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.
[50] 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.
[54] Grabar's 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.
[63] Grabar planned to expand the former private collection into a comprehensive showcase of national art, including the controversial Russian and French modernist paintings.
[62] 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.
As prescribed by the Bolsheviks in December 1918, Grabar's institutions catalogued all known heritage, "an action tantamount to confiscation",[67] and despite continuing war many nationalized landmarks were actually restored.
Grabar successfully exploited whatever allies he could recruit amongst the ambivalent[69] Soviet bureaucracy, starting with the Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky,[66] and even managed to retain his affluent lifestyle of the past.
"[46] These appointments inevitably placed Grabar near the top of the Soviet machine of confiscating church and, to a lesser extent, privately held art treasures.
[79] The preservationist Old Moscow Society, unable to influence the authorities any longer, voted itself out of existence, and Grabar's heritage commission was disbanded a few months later.
[80] Grabar supervised another New York exhibition, this time of icon art, in 1931[81] 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.
[38] Contrary to the communist policy, Autobiography appreciated the "formalist" art of Mir Iskusstva and dismissed "some critics applying Marxist analysis" as utterly incompetent.
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.
[90] He retained his administrative and university jobs and in 1954 co-authored Russian architecture of the first half of the 18th century,[91] a revisionist[92] study of the period that dismissed the knowledge collected by fellow historians before 1917.
[92] 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.
[92] These falsified theories, easily dismissed today, established the "provincial outlook" that governed the post-war generation of Soviet art historians.
[93] After Stalin's death, Grabar was the first to publicly denounce run-of-the-mill socialist realism and pay the dues to once banished Aristarkh Lentulov and Pyotr Konchalovsky.
[94] 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.
