O
About
Oleg Grabar rahimahullah (November 3, 1929 - January 8, 2011) was a French-born art historian who became the pre-eminent Western scholar of Islamic art and architecture of his generation. He studied history at the University of Paris before moving to the United States in 1948, completing his PhD at Princeton University on the Umayyad period and the emergence of Islamic art. He taught at the University of Michigan before joining Harvard University, where he served as the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art from 1981 to 1990 and helped found Harvard's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. He then joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, where he remained until his death. His foundational works include The Formation of Islamic Art (1973), The Illustrations of the Maqamat (1984), Islamic Art and Architecture, 650 to 1250 (1987, co-authored with Richard Ettinghausen), and The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (1996). Masterpieces of Islamic Art surveys illuminated manuscript traditions from the eighth to the seventeenth century.
