Awards
2005 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Oleg Grabar
Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (1992)
With the Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, CAA proudly honors the career of Oleg Grabar. For half a century, Grabar has been the embodiment of the discipline of Islamic art history; in fact, this award could easily have been a teaching award for training a host of future scholars in the field, including more than thirty doctoral students. Like his own work, their interests encompass the entire history and range of Islamic art, architecture, manuscripts, decorative arts, and ornament.
The author of 18 books and more than 132 articles, Grabar has spanned the length and breadth of Islamic art history. His own foundational scholarship began with The Formation of Islamic Art (1973) and continued with the magisterial Pelican volume on earlier Islamic art and architecture, written in collaboration with Richard Ettinghausen (1987; 2nd ed. 2000). Grabar even pioneered the archaeological investigation of early Islam (The City in the Desert, 1978). Presenting the distinguished Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in 1989 on The Mediation of Ornament (1992), he further redefined his field with formal, semantic, and reception analyses. Most recently he has published on Persian manuscripts, Mostly Miniatures (2000), and on patronage and codicology, Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of Mongol Shahname (1980). Grabar has always given close attention to essential monuments across Dar-al-Islam, and these include book-length studies: The Alhambra (1978), The Great Mosque of Isfahan (1990), and The Shape of the Holy (1996), on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Previous positions and honors attest to his professional contributions and stature. After receiving his doctorate at Princeton University in 1955, Grabar taught at the University of Michigan (1954–69) and Harvard University (1969–90) before culminating his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He established the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and served as founding editor of the major journal in his field, Muqarnas. He is one of the rare art historians to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has received similar accolades from societies in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, and France, along with the Charles Freer Medal for contributions to the study of the arts of Asia (2001). Perhaps the greatest testimonial to Grabar’s lasting influence is the firmly established rigor and status of the field of Islamic art in major American art-history programs. He is renowned for his interdisciplinary dialogue with students of all levels and fields. He has truly established and personally shaped a major field of our discipline, and we are honored to recognize his lifelong contribution.
Committee: Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York, chair; Terrie F. Sultan, Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston; Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania; John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University.
