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years, the archive contains thousands of photographs, slides, notes, specialized and hard-to-find research materials, unpublished works including lectures and student theses, historical maps, and ephemera.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.

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.

55.6 Linear Feet (126 boxes, 6 flatfile folders)

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