André Grabar was born in Kyiv (Ukraine) on July 26, 1896. He completed his secondary education there, graduating in 1913 in Russia. Unfit for military service, he took no part in either the 1914-1918 war or the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), and left Russia in January 1920. From 1920 to 1922, he lived in Sofia (Bulgaria), where he held a position at the Archaeological Museum, photographing the country's religious murals. After reading Russian at the University of Strasbourg in 1922, he took up a lectureship in art history and, in 1928, defended a doctorate thesis on religious painting in Bulgaria. Naturalized French in 1928, in 1936 he was appointed lecturer in the art and civilization of Byzantium and the Slavic world. In 1937, following in Gabriel Millet's footsteps, he took charge of lectures on Byzantine Christianity and Christian archaeology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He taught there until 1966. In the meantime, he was appointed to the chair of Paleochristian and Byzantine Archaeology at the Collège de France in 1946, where he remained until his own retirement in 1966. In 1955, he became a full member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. He is an associate member of numerous international academies in Austria, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, the USA and Germany. Some fifteen foreign universities have also awarded him honorary doctorates.
André Grabar is the author of groundbreaking books that shed original and erudite light on the Byzantine world, including L'Empereur dans l'art byzantin (1936), Martyrium (1943-1946), L'Iconoclasme byzantin (1957) and Les Voies de la création en iconographie chrétienne (1978). With Jean Hubert, he also founded the journal Cahiers archéologiques (1946).
André Grabar died on October 3, 1990.
Notice written by Marc Verdure (Collège de France – Institut des Civilisations).
