Editor-in-Chief
DR JÓZEF GRABSKI
Born in Warsaw in 1950. In 1968 he passed his secondary school leaving examination at the French secondary school in Warsaw. In 1968–1972 he studied art history at the Warsaw University, from which he graduated with a master’s thesis about iconography of Renaissance Venetian painting (his advisor was Prof. Dr. Jan Białostocki). In the years 1971 and 1972 he repeatedly held scholarships and did research at the Fondazione Cini in Venice. In 1971 he was chosen by Henryk Stażewski (the laureate of the “Gottfried-von-Herder Preis” in 1971) to be awarded the scholarship of the Herder Prize. From 1972 he continued studies in art history at the Vienna University. In 1973 he participated in the CIHA International Congress of Art History in Granada (Spain). In 1976, at the Vienna University, he defended his doctorate which treated Leon Chwistek and his “zones theory” in painting. The years 1975 and 1976 brought further studies and research-stays at the Fondazione R. Longhi and the Villa I Tatti (Harvard University) in Florence. As their result he published articles on Donatello, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, and Padovano. In 1977 he was awarded Prof. Karolina Lanckorońska’s (Fundatio Lanckoroński) scholarship to pursue further research on the art of Italian Renaissance.
After the CIHA International Congress of Art History in Bologna in 1979, together with an international group of scholars (André Chastel, Jan Białostocki, Federico Zeri, W. Roger Rearick, Hermann Fillitz) he founded the International Institute for Art Historical Research IRSA (Istituto per le Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte) with headquarters in Venice and became its director. Next year, in 1980 he started publishing a scholarly art-historical journal entitled Artibus et Historiae, of which he has been the editor until now. IRSA Publishing House has hitherto published over 600 papers, written by scholars from most of European countries and many of the world.
In 1990, in Vienna, he established a gallery of fine art named “Apollo Art Galleries”. Since 1980 he had been working on creating collection of fine art for Barbara Piasecka Johnson. A part of this collection was shown on the “OPUS SACRUM” exhibition at the Royal Castle Warsaw, which Dr Grabski co-organised, together with Prof. Andrzej Rottermund.
Dr Grabski has developed special ties with Japan, where he co-created two great museum collections of European art, namely that of Marubeni and Takeuchi. Since 1992, as a visiting professor, he had held lectures at the Art History Department of the Sendai University (Tohoku Daigaku) among others, cycles on Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Van Dyck. In 1996 a branch of IRSA, dealing with mutual relations of European and Asian art, was established at the Sendai University (dir. Prof. Hidemichi Tanaka).
The main area of Dr Grabski’s interest is, however, modern European art. He has been interested particularly in the work of Donatello, Giorgione, Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, Paris Bordone, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Caroselli, Algardi, Rubens, Van Dyck, Artemisia Gentileschi, Vermeer van Delft, and Rembrandt.
Dr Grabski’s wife, Maria, is a psychologist, and they have four children: Barbara, Mathias, Krystyna and Joanna.