Hrabar, Ihor

Hrabar, Ihor or Grabar, Igor [Грабар, Ігор], b 25 March 1871 in Budapest, d 16 May 1960 in Moscow. Painter and historian of art; from 1943 full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and from 1947 of the USSR Academy of Arts. He came from a Russophile family from Transcarpathia. His mother was Olha Hrabar, and he was brought up by his grandfather, Adolf Dobriansky, in the village of Chertizhne, Prešov region; his brother was Volodymyr Hrabar (Vladimir Grabar). After graduating from the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg (1898), where he studied under Ilia Repin, he studied painting with A. Ažbé in Munich (1903–8). From 1910 he lived in Russia, first in Saint Petersburg and then in Moscow. From landscape art in the impressionist style he turned in the 1920s to portraiture in the official socialist-realist style. He edited and wrote some chapters of the six-volume Istoriia russkogo iskusstva (The History of Russian Art, 1909–16), which also contains information about Ukrainian art. In 1955 Hrabar visited Transcarpathia and donated 36 paintings to the Transcarpathian Painting Gallery in Uzhhorod. A detailed account of his work can be found in his autobiography Moia zhizn' (My Life, 1937).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]