OLEG GRABAR T. KEVIN BIRCH, PHOTOGRAPHER. FROM THE SHELBY WHITE AND LEON LEVY ARCHIVES T. PRINCETON, N.J., USA. STUDY, CENTER, INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED 3 november 1929 . 8 january 2011

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 156, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2012 biographical memoirs

HE and architecture community mourned the loss of one of its most infl uential and insightful scholars, who played a crucial role in shaping this relatively young fi eld. TOleg Grabar, professor emeritus of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Aga Khan Professor, emeritus, at , passed away at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on 8 January 2011, at the age of eighty-one. There are few, if any, Is- lamicists who have not profi ted from his multifaceted scholarly contri- butions. His resounding impact on expanding the scope of the Islamic fi eld was offi cially recognized by the Chairman’s Award from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which he received in Doha on 24 Novem- ber 2010, shortly before his death. This award celebrated his lifelong achievements in the study of the Islamic world’s architectural heritage, greatly enhancing the understanding of that heritage by emphasizing its geographical and chronological diversity, as well as contextualizing it within its political, social, economic, and cultural settings. Oleg Grabar was born on 3 November 1929 in Strasbourg, France, where his father (a Russian émigré) taught art history at the University of Strasbourg. As the son of the formidable André Grabar, the eminent historian of Byzantine art, he was born almost “from the cradle” to be an art historian. Thanks to his upbringing, he savored throughout his career a special fascination with the Byzantine and late antique heritage of the Mediterranean world. This fascination extended to his explora- tions of early Islamic art in graduate school, with seventh- to eighth- century Umayyad architecture forming the core of his scholarship, even when it broadened later on to embrace a much wider spectrum. During his early education in France, Grabar received three certifi - cats de licence from the University of Paris in 1948 and 1950: in an- cient, medieval, and modern history. After moving to the United States, when his father was appointed to the Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, he earned an A.B. magna cum laude in medieval his- tory from Harvard University in 1950. It was at that he began to develop a passion for Islamic art, while obtaining his Ph.D. (1955) in Oriental languages and literatures and the history of art. He taught at the from 1954 to 1969, mov- ing through the ranks as professor of Near Eastern art and Near East- ern studies. He simultaneously served as honorary curator of Near Eastern art for the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution (1958–69); director of the American School of Oriental Research in Je- rusalem (1960–61, vice president in 1967–75); director of the Qasr al- Hayr al-Sharqi excavations (1964–72); and Near Eastern editor of Ars Orientalis (1957–70). When Grabar joined Harvard in 1969, he was the fi rst ever to teach Islamic art, as professor of fi ne arts. Teaching

[ 452 ] oleg grabar 453 there for twenty-one years until 1990, he was instrumental in the cre- ation of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, and as fi rst holder of that chair (1980–90) founded the program’s annual journal, Muqarnas. Subsequently joining the Institute for Advanced Study, from which he retired in 1998, he remained active in scholarship until his last breath. Grabar’s prolifi c publications testify to the range, depth, and vigor of his scholarly achievement. He wrote more than 20 books (some translated into multiple languages) and more than 120 articles, 83 of which he selected to be reprinted in the four-volume collection Con- structing the Study of Islamic Art (Ashgate, 2005–06). He was primar- ily a medievalist, trained in Arabic and deeply captivated by the Arab world, particularly . As one of the “last generalists,” before the exponential growth of the Islamic fi eld led to increasing specializa- tion, he published on many subjects. He used to teach graduate semi- nars on topics that often formed the basis of his books. It was also his habit to publish rapidly and move on to other subjects, for he did not mind revising views he had expounded in past publications. The ear- nestness with which he was prepared to rethink old formulations was a testimony to the mental agility and non-dogmatic fl exibility that made him an extraordinarily inspiring mentor. Being more interested in de- veloping innovative perspectives on well-established subjects than in exploring new topics (a task he generally assigned to his students), Gra- bar was always open to well-argued objections and ready to change his views. His best-known books are The Formation of Islamic Art (1973, 1987), the collaborative two-volume City in the Desert, Qasr al-Hayr East (1978), The Alhambra (1978), Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Sh¯ahn¯ama (co-authored with Sheila Blair, 1980), The Illustrations of the Maq¯am¯at (1984), The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–1250 (co-authored with , 1987; revised second edition, 2001), The Great Mosque of Isfahan (1990), The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (1992), The Mediation of Ornament (1992), The (with Saïd Nuseibeh, 1996), Mostly Miniatures: An Introduction to Persian Paint- ing (2000), and Masterpieces of Islamic Art: The Decorated Page from the 8th to the 17th Century (2009). Grabar’s unpublished Princeton dissertation on the architecture and ceremonial of the Umayyad court exemplifi ed his contextual ap- proach to material culture. This approach refl ected his primarily histor- ical training, at a time when the fi eld of Islamic art was in its infancy, represented in the United States by a single luminary, Professor Richard Ettinghausen (d. 1979), a mentor with whom he later collaborated on 454 biographical memoirs writing the principal survey book on medieval Islamic art and architec- ture up to 1250. Grabar’s seminal work, The Formation of Islamic Art, is perhaps the masterpiece among his publications and a classic. Evolving from the Baldwin Lectures delivered at Oberlin College in 1969, it consider- ably expanded the scope of his 1955 dissertation. Although its chrono- logical span covers the Abbasid period, one can still detect the primacy of observations derived from his closer involvement with the Umayy- ads and their Mediterranean base. Formation’s original and refreshing interpretive framework, analyzing the complex transition from late an- tiquity to early medieval times, made the Islamic fi eld appear wide open to hugely exciting questions of cultural and social history. Rarely an- swered in full, these grand questions were posed to challenge the minds of generations of scholars to come. The book is judged in one of Gra- bar’s obituaries as “more a work of cultural than art history,” revealing that he was “more interested in ideas and context” than in focused study of monuments and objects themselves. Later in his career, however, Grabar increasingly became enamored of the purely visual pleasures of Islamic art and its capacity for univer- sal aesthetic appeal, regardless of contextual specifi city. Such was his vivid imagination and playful mind that he hardly subscribed to a sin- gle method. Given his receptivity to new ideas, the trajectory of his publications moved from an initial historically oriented, archaeological approach grounded in written primary sources, to other methodolo- gies. This helped integrate his fi eld into the theoretical concerns of the evolving discipline of art history, which was then shifting away from archaeology. Nevertheless, his engagements with theory tended toward intuitive speculation, shunning systematic frameworks. As the Aga Khan Professor for a decade during the 1980s, Grabar primarily focused on architecture and urbanism, experimenting with the theoretical perspectives of structural linguistics and semiotics. The cul- mination of these investigations, which continued to be based on an er- udite command of written primary sources, was his magisterial master- piece, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Its subject was one that he never tired of revisiting, since his fi rst major article on the Dome of the Rock (1959), an elusive building that he continually reinter- preted from different angles in several articles and two monographs. From his Harvard retirement in 1990 onward, Grabar’s oeuvre once again took on a new direction. Turning from architecture to the arts of the object and manuscript painting, he now tended to explore philosophical and psychological questions that extended into the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. This transformation is especially ex- emplifi ed in The Mediation of Ornament, Mostly Miniatures, and his oleg grabar 455 fi nal book, Masterpieces of Islamic Art. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts he delivered in Washington, D.C., to a non- specialist audience, Mediation became an instant hit, with its creative exposition of fl uid links among Islamic ornament, other universal tra- ditions, and modernist abstraction. Among its original insights was the observation that Islamic ornament’s low degree of intrinsic symbolic meaning privileged the emotive subjectivity of viewers. Grabar admitted that this book found far wider appeal among non-specialist audiences, including art critics and contemporary artists, an assessment supported by its numerous reviews. Its cross-cultural approach also resonated with the growing global appeal of forging links between historical and contemporary artworks. The global reach of Grabar’s scholarship had an impact far be- yond his own fi eld. He possessed a very special talent for making Is- lamic art seductive to general audiences, thereby vastly broadening its recognition within the two disciplines of art history and Islamic stud- ies. He boldly posed sweeping questions about the nature, meaning, and dynamics of the Islamic visual tradition at a time when little was known about this subject. In addition to cultivating world-class ad- vanced scholarship and research in his fi eld, he challenged Euro- American perspectives more generally. As his student, colleague, and successor at Harvard, I experienced fi rsthand his enduring mark on our fi eld, in which he literally trained scores of students, many of whom went on to become leading scholars, educators, curators, and practitioners around the world. Grabar would encourage graduate students to work on entirely unexplored subjects because he was deeply concerned about shaping the parameters of a newly developing fi eld, whose rapid expansion both pleased and wor- ried him. That is why he used to stress the need to harness technologi- cal advances in information processing so as to make knowledge more accessible, in the vain hope of counteracting the increasing drive to- ward specialization. His pioneering and path-breaking scholarship was acknowledged with numerous awards, including the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Medal of the University of California, Los Angeles (1996), the Charles Lang Freer Medal (2001), the College Art Association Distinguished Life- time Achievement for Writing in Art Award (2005), and the Chair- man’s Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010). Grabar was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Medieval Academy of Amer- ica; and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy, Institut de France, and British Academy. Going beyond the academic pursuits of teaching and publishing, he sought to popularize his fi eld through 456 biographical memoirs interviews, fi lms, and interactions with architects, planners, and conser- vation specialists. Oleg Grabar brought passion and vision to his work, and his ex- pansive personality, generosity of spirit, collegiality, conviviality, and humor were truly infectious. It is through his lasting scholarly legacy and personal remembrances that he shall continue to live, guide, and in- spire for years to come. By pioneering new ways of looking and think- ing, Grabar left behind a transformed intellectual landscape for later generations. While it is not possible to predict the future impact of his legacy, may the many seeds he planted throughout his prosperous life yield an ever-fl ourishing harvest.

Elected 1990; Committees: Advisory on Election of Members 1996–97; Membership IV 1992–98, 2005–06; Publications 1993–2002

Gülru Necipoglu ˇ Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Department of History of Art and Architecture Harvard University

This biographical memoir is largely based on a more personal version with fewer observa- tions on scholarly trajectory: my “Editor’s Foreword. In Memoriam Oleg Grabar (1929– 2011),” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World 28 (2011): vii-xv. For the touching personal remembrances of former students, colleagues, friends, and family, presented at Oleg Grabar’s memorial service held at the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard on 23 April 2011, by (in order) William Graham, Gülru Necipoˇglu, Lisa Golombek, , Nasser Rabbat, Nicolas Grabar, Neil Levine, Marianna Shreve Simpson, Giles Con- stable, and Massumeh Farhad, with Thomas Lentz’s added tribute at the reception that fol- lowed in the Busch Reisinger, see compiled texts online at the Web site for the Aga Khan Pro- gram for Islamic Architecture at Harvard: http://agakhan.fas.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic 888988.fi les/Oleg_Grabar_Remembrances_04-23-2011. Also see the introductions of two Festschriften: Margaret Ševˇcenko, ed., “Introduction,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): vii-ix; Julia B ailey and Gülru Necipoˇglu, eds., “In Tribute to Oleg Grabar,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): vii. The successive sections of Grabar’s complete bibliography are published in these two volumes and in Muqarnas 28. I have consulted several published obituaries, including the most comprehensive one on the Web site of the Institute for Advanced Study: “Oleg Grabar 1929–2011 (Princeton, NJ- Monday, January 10, 2011)”: http://www.ias.edu/news/press-releases/2011/01/10/grabar; and anon. [Robert Hillenbrand], New York Times, 17 February 2011. Two thoughtful and longer obituaries by Hillenbrand appeared later on: “Oleg Grabar, Distinguished Historian of Islamic Art,” Iranian Studies 45.1 (2012): 139–44; and “Oleg Grabar: The Scholarly Leg- acy,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (June 2012); 1–35.