Oleg Grabar papers, 1898-2009

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Summary

Creators:
Grabar, Oleg
Abstract:
The Oleg Grabar papers document the career of the scholar who transformed the field of Islamic art history in the United States. Compiled over more than fifty years, the archive contains thousands of photographs, slides, notes, specialized and hard-to-find research materials, unpublished works including lectures and student theses, historical maps, and ephemera. A small amount of material, especially photographs of Byzantine art and architecture, originally collected by his father, André Grabar, is also included.
Extent:
55.6 Linear Feet (126 boxes, 6 flatfile folders) and 4.5 GB (1,743 files)
Language:
Collection material is in English and French with some German and other languages.

Background

Scope and content:

The Oleg Grabar papers document the career of the scholar who transformed the field of Islamic art history in the United States. Amassed over more than fifty years, the archive contains thousands of photographs, slides, notes, specialized and hard-to-find research materials, unpublished works including lectures and student theses, historical maps, and ephemera. A small amount of material, especially photographs of Byzantine art and architecture, originally collected by André Grabar is also included.

Focusing on Grabar's fieldwork and site documentation, the first series contains the majority of the original material in the archive. Notes, drawings, and photographs record Grabar's excavation work, detailed on-site studies, site surveys, and study travels. Unique photographs, in the form of prints, negatives and slides, display images ranging from sites in obscure areas of the Middle East or Central Asia to well-known monuments, such as the Alhambra or the Dome of the Rock, captured with Grabar's eye for special details. The earlier photographs are particularly important for documenting the mid-twentieth-century state of preservation before subsequent alterations or even destruction of monuments.

Research materials assembled by Grabar for his publications and projects comprise the bulk of the archive. Offprints and photocopies of articles form the overwhelming majority of the material, but occasionally notes, letters received, photographs, and drawings are included. Since almost all of the material in this series is available through other sources, its value lies in the aggregation for ease of research and in the snapshot it presents of Oleg Grabar's intellectual landscape. The material testifies to the scope of Grabar's interests, covering all areas of Islamic art and architecture, and related historical and cultural issues and literary topics in the Islamic world, as well as both its antecedents and contemporary developments in the Classical and post-Classical worlds, in the Byzantine sphere and the Medieval West.

Three small series relating to Grabar's writings, correspondence, and faculty and professional service complete the archive. Included in these series are a few drafts of lectures and publication production material, as well as a scattering of correspondence and materials relating to two courses Grabar taught at Harvard. Grabar's work with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the various entities funded by the Aga Khan Development Network is more fully documented.

In order to facilitate access, the names of sites and monuments used in this finding aid conform to the preferred usage of ArchNet, the online architectural community sponsored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Other transliterations of Arabic generally follow Grabar's usage.

Arrangement

Arranged in five series: Series I. Fieldwork and site documentation, 1927-2002, undated; Series II. Research materials, 1898-2009, undated; Series III. Lectures and writings, 1988-2000, undated; Series IV. Correspondence, 1935-1995, undated; Series V. Faculty and professional service, 1975-2006, undated.

Biographical / historical:

Oleg Grabar, the distinguished scholar and professor of Islamic art and architecture, was almost destined to be an academic. By the time he was born on November 3, 1929, his father André Grabar, who had left Russia after the revolution, was teaching art history at the University of Strasbourg in France and well on his way to becoming the pre-eminent Byzantinist of his generation. In 1938, André Grabar accepted the chair of Christian Archaeology at the École pratique des hautes études and the family moved to Paris. The young Oleg Grabar, fluent in French and Russian, grew up in this intense, highly intellectual, French academic environment, immersed in the ideas of his father's friends and colleagues, including scholars such as Jean Sauvaget, Marc Bloch and Ernst Kantorowicz.

Oleg Grabar developed a philological and historical interest in Eastern cultures as a teenager. After attempting to learn Chinese on his own, he was introduced to the Arabic-speaking world by Sauvaget. Preparing for the École normale superieure, Grabar attended the University of Paris from which he earned three certificats de licence in Ancient (1948), Medieval (1950) and Modern (1950) History. When André Grabar accepted an appointment at Dumbarton Oaks in 1948, Oleg accompanied the family to the United States. He enrolled at Harvard University, staying in the United States when his family returned to France, and received a BA in Medieval History in 1950. In January of 1951 Grabar enrolled at Princeton University, planning to continue his study of history. Soon, however, Grabar's dissatisfaction with Princeton's history program led him to move toward the department of Art and Archaeology, and it was there that he developed his interest in Islamic art. Grabar received an MA in 1953 and a PhD in 1955 in a special combined program of the departments of Oriental Languages and Literature and the History of Art, with a dissertation on the art and ceremony of the Umayyad court.

Grabar had a long academic career. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1954 as an instructor in the History of Art and progressed through the academic ranks, becoming a full professor in 1964. Grabar left Michigan in 1969 to return to Harvard, where he was the first professor to teach Islamic art. In 1980 he was appointed to the newly created Aga Khan Professorship of Islamic art, a position he would hold until his retirement from Harvard in 1990. Grabar then joined the faculty of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from which he retired for a second time in 1998. A charismatic teacher and inspiring mentor, Grabar supervised over 60 doctoral dissertations, literally staffing the ranks of professors, curators, and scholars of Islamic art and architecture, in the United States and abroad, in the later twentieth century.

A prolific scholar, Oleg Grabar authored over 20 books and 120 articles. His early work was notable for applying a more contextualist approach to the study of Islamic art than that of his predecessors. Informed by his historical training, Grabar generally focused on what art could say about Islamic culture as a whole, rather than on objects solely as works of art. In a world of ever-increasing specialization, perhaps the most striking aspect of Grabar's scholarly output is its range: from standard reference works, like his contribution to the Pelican History of Art series, to detailed scholarly books and articles, to lavishly illustrated books attractive to a more general readership. He worked on areas and topics ranging from architecture to manuscript illumination to aesthetics, from Moorish Spain to Mughal India to Jerusalem.

In addition to teaching and publishing, Grabar took on numerous other duties, serving as an excavator, a curator, and an administrator at various times. In 1982, Grabar founded Muqarnas, a journal devoted to Islamic visual culture, and he had earlier served as an editor for Ars Orientalis (1957-1970). He served as an advocate for all aspects of Islamic art and architecture, contemporary as well as historical, working to rid the art history canon of its Western bias. He had longstanding relationships with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and with the organizations under the aegis of the Aga Khan Development Network. He also sought to popularize Islamic art with a general audience through public lectures and films. In recognition of his service to the study of Islamic art, Grabar was the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Charles Lang Freer medal (2001) and the Chairman's Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010), as well as two Festschriften (1993 and 2008).

After his retirement in 1998, Grabar remained active in the field. He continued to publish, lecture, and travel extensively throughout America, Europe, and the Middle East until shortly before his death on January 8, 2011.

Acquisition information:
Gifts of Prof. Oleg and Ms. Terri Grabar. Acquired as a series of gifts between 2001 and 2012.
Physical location:
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Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Location of this collection:
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, US
Contact:
(310) 440-7390
Website