Igor Grabar’s tombstone restored at Novodevichy Cemetery

The tombstone on the grave of painter Igor Grabar (1871-1960), who was also the founder of Soviet museum and restoration affairs, has been fully restored. Resting in the same grave are his son, mathematician Mstislav Grabar (1925-2006), and Maria Grabar (1893-1964), his wife’s sister. The family memorial is in section 8, row 4 of the Novodevichy Cemetery.

The limestone sculptural stele and its four-stone granite pedestal have been given a facelift.

The stele recapitulates Igor Grabar’s activities. He was the founding father of the Soviet restoration school and did a lot to restore Old Russian churches and icons, including those painted by Andrei Rublev. The stele features several bas-reliefs, including St Gerasimus and the Lion, a Biblical story popular with Russian icon-painters, as well as a saint’s face and a bird in the Old Russian style. The painter’s given and family name as well as his birth and death years are chiseled in block letters on a side facet.

The tombstone was designed in the 1980s by architect Anatoly Dubovsky and sculptor Vladimir Rogaishis.

“The sculptural composition is made of porous limestone, a good absorber of moisture, which feeds mildew and moss. The stone is also prone to crumbling and weathering. The monument’s surface had cavities, chips and cracks,” Alexei Yemelyanov, head of the Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage, explained.

Four months of restoration work

Igor Grabar’s grave has been a regional cultural heritage site since 1992. This explains why the four-month restoration project was coordinated with the Department of Cultural Heritage and supervised by its experts.

The restorers have cleaned the white-stone tombstone and the granite pedestal of dust, dirt, mildew and moss and removed later surface masticings, or spots covered with a mastic compound to camouflage the stone’s unevenness and defects. The chips and cracks got filled in with special compounds; seams between slabs were hermetically sealed; and old paint was removed from the letters and replaced with new black and gold paint. At the last stage, the surface of the sculptural composition and the pedestals were covered with a protective waterproof solution that would protect the memorial from environmental impacts and prevent the formation of mildew and fungi.

Igor Grabar was a Russian and Soviet painter, restorer, art critic, museum figure, and teacher. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (Ilya Repin’s studio). He was involved in painting and architecture. From 1910 to the 1920s, he engaged in museum activities and protected monuments. He also published the first History of Russian Art in six volumes. Between 1913 and 1925, he headed the Tretyakov Gallery, where he systematised the displays by arranging the works in chronological order. In 1918, he established a network of Central Restoration Workshops, which saved many Old Russian masterpieces. Grabar restored The Trinity by Andrei Rublev, his favourite icon painter. He also wrote books about Valentin Serov and Isaak Levitan, as well as a two-volume monograph about his teacher Ilya Repin, which won the Stalin Prize.

The Novodevichy Cemetery is one of the best-known and oldest graveyards in Moscow. Its first burials date back to the 16th century, which were those of nuns and female royalty. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, the cemetery, owing to its court status, was reserved for the internment of the aristocracy, including such princely families as the Golitsyns, Gagarins, Dolgorukys and Trubetskys. But later, increasingly more merchants, rich townsfolk, industrialists and intellectuals would be buried next to the nobles. By the early 20thcentury, there was practically no vacant space, and it was decided to add to the necropolis two hectares of land abutting the nunnery’s southern wall.    

There are more than 26,000 people buried within the necropolis, including artists, writers, poets, architects, philosophers, composers, scientists, statesmen and military figures. Here are just a few names: Dmitry Shostakovich, Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anton Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Yuri Levitan, Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei Eisenstein, and others. The Novodevichy nunnery’s complex is a federal cultural heritage site and has been put on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

Restoring the tombstones

The Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage has developed a system to monitor the condition of artistic tombstones in Moscow. The system makes it possible to keep track of the state of all monuments listed as cultural heritage sites. The city has about 2,000 historic and military history facilities.

Earlier this year, the status of regional cultural heritage site was conferred on the memorial complex and grave of Air Marshal Ivan Kozhedub in the Novodevichy Cemetery. The Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage is restoring 19 artistic tombstones, with designs being made for another 105. Last year, 38 artistic tombstones were restored across Moscow’s cemeteries.