Rating and value of paintings by Igor Grabar

If you own a work by or based on the work of artist Igor Grabar and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers will guide you.

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Artist's rating and value

A Russian artist and pioneer of abstraction, Igor Grabar established himself as a major artist of his time. He produced works inspired by several twentieth-century currents and his native country, mixing media.

On the art market, his works sell for very good prices and keep a stable quotation.

As such, a work signed by the artist's hand can fetch millions of euros at auction, as evidenced by his oil on canvas View of the Moscow riverdating from 1922, fetched €287,300 in 2016, reflecting the growing interest of collectors in Grabar's works.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's works and style

Igor Grabar, born in 1871, evolved at a time when landscape painting in Russia was still seeking its own language. Very early on, he managed to break away from the dogmas imposed by the Academy of Fine Arts to assert a personal style that would flourish particularly in the first decades of the 20th century.

Grabar doesn't just paint landscapes: he makes them sensitive. The real, in his works, becomes a kind of pretext for exploring light and its play on natural elements.

Like the French Impressionists who inspired him, he breaks light down into distinct touches, using nuances and contrasts that give his canvases an almost palpable texture.

But unlike the latter, Grabar anchors his art in a deeper, more narrative realism, seeking to render the Russian soul through his landscapes.

His heavy skies, infinite expanses or the banks of the Volga are all symbols of the national character, of this nature that seems both infinite and intimate, of an icy yet luminous beauty, often imbued with a sense of solitude.

His technique, always on the border between impressionism and realism, uses broad brushstrokes and vibrant colors, but Grabar goes further by accentuating the immersive effect. He gives each scene an almost tactile dimension, where the material seems to melt into the atmosphere itself.

His canvases are not mere views; they breathe, they vibrate. The landscape becomes an extension of light, air and space, in an almost abstract way of capturing the soul of the place.

In his depictions of the Russian winter, as in his famous views of the Volga, snow, wind and the light that freezes in the air do not appear as external elements, but as living, dynamic actors that alter the viewer's perception.

The diversity of the landscapes he paints - from riverbanks to snow-covered expanses - shows his ability to capture unique atmospheres, imbued with solitude and grandeur. His winter landscapes, where cold and light merge, show an eternal, mysterious, almost magical Russia.

Each canvas is an invitation to lose oneself in this immensity that seems to engulf man while leaving him space for contemplation. Light, omnipresent in his works, seems to be the true protagonist of his landscapes.

It is by turns soft and radiant or dark and ethereal, casting shadows that do not weigh down the scene but lend it a mysterious depth.

Grabar makes this light a real character, an invisible link between man and nature, a link that goes beyond the simple representation of reality to verge on the intimate, the purely emotional.

The composition of Grabar's works

But beyond the light, it's the composition of his works that captivates the eye. Space never stands still; it seems to move under the effect of his brushstrokes, as if nature were in perpetual motion.

Each landscape seems suspended between two worlds: that of reality and that of sensation. His winter scenes are not picturesque clichés, nor do they seek to move us with their dazzling beauty.

They plunge us into a harsher, yet poignant reality, that of a space where man and nature are never separated, but where the fragility of human existence is measured against the immensity and strength of nature.

In his landscapes, Grabar succeeds in this tour de force of making visible what often escapes the human eye: the emotional intensity of a landscape, its evocative power, its ability to touch the soul.

In this way, Grabar transforms each landscape into a meditation on Russian nature, its strengths and weaknesses. His canvases, far from being content with mere realistic observation, reflect a deep sense of belonging to a unique space, a space that goes beyond the visible to touch the intangible.

In this, he plays a fundamental role in the evolution of Russian painting, redefining landscape not as a static genre but as a meeting place between man and nature, a place where every element seems charged with meaning and emotion.

The life of Igor Grabar

Born in 1871 in Petersburg, Igor Grabar trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, but quickly distinguished himself from his contemporaries. From his earliest works, light and color seem to be the true subjects of his painting.

Paradoxically, it is in this quest for reality, through the exploration of the effects of light on landscape, that he moves away from classical representation.

His canvases become a subtle interplay of light and shadow, vivid strokes that flirt with the impressionist touch, while remaining faithful to the richness of Russian space.

These early works, which seem to play with shapes, the very texture of paint, are a "perversion" of the traditional landscape, in which the often imprecise contour line dissolves into a variety of nuances.

Like a reinterpretation of light itself, his landscapes become abstractions of nature, where the atmosphere seems to play more than the subject.

In the period following the October Revolution, far from allowing himself to be overshadowed by the political transformations, Grabar would choose to become a curator of the national heritage, while pursuing his painting.

While the country was being torn apart, his work tightened around a more intimate, personal vision of landscape.

Paradoxically, his painting became more fixed, as if to counter the speed of History. The Russian landscape, in its changing light and reflections, seems to freeze in a suspended moment, where every gesture on the canvas becomes testimony to a world that is unravelling, while seeking to capture its essence.

Grabar, as a master of light, captures through his work a Russia that is fading under the layers of time and history, but of which he remains the last witness.

Focus on Spring, Igor Grabar, 1905

The "dissolution" of shapes and contours is reinforced in Spring (1905). Here, nature itself seems to fragment and recompose itself under the effect of light. The subject of the canvas is no longer the figure or object, but the space they occupy, the unfolding light.

Trees, flowers, and sky merge in a waltz of colors that no longer fix, but vibrate, oscillating between frenetic strokes of green and yellow.

The once-defined contours fade, crumble and disappear, giving way to a painting of light and atmosphere, where density and lightness meet and intersect. Light and shadow, dense zones and airy passages no longer simply draw space, they redefine its very dimensions.

In this play of contrasts, form blossoms in evanescence and dilutes in omnipresent light. The landscape thus becomes moving matter, where the brushstroke, increasingly effaced, seems to dissolve in the air.

This is where Grabar, through his impressionist technique, abandons rigid contours and favors an almost organic vibration that frees itself from any pre-existing form.

The canvas seems to react to light, as if the elements of nature were a single entity, dynamic and fluid, escaping gravity, the immobility of forms.

And yet, everything here is painting: in this fluidity, matter asserts itself all the more, unfurls into spaces that seem inaccessible to the illusion of a fixed representation.

Stylistically, he is close to other Russian artists such as Mikhail Guermacheff, Constantin Westchiloff and Constantin Korovine.

His signature

Not all of Igor Grabar's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of his signature:

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