Lazar Rempel

Lazar Izrailevich Rempel was born in Kishinev on 6 November 1907 in the old style (19 November in the new). In 1914 the family followed his father to Bykhov, in 1917 they fled the war to Feodosia, and after his father’s death in 1923 they settled in Simferopol.

From 1924 he worked at the Central Museum of Taurida in Simferopol, rising from trainee to head of a department. In 1928 he went to Moscow and graduated from the university in 1931; in 1931–1933 he was a postgraduate student at the State Academy of Art Studies, and he worked at the Museum of Oriental Cultures, at the Institute of Literature and Art of the Communist Academy and, in 1934–1937, at the All-Union Academy of Architecture, while also teaching at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. He became interested in the art of Central Asia as a student and published his first piece on it in 1930; a book on the painting of Soviet Transcaucasia followed in 1932 and one on the architecture of postwar Italy in 1935.

In 1937 his second wife, the art historian T. V. Vyaznikovtseva, was arrested, and Rempel, as a member of her family, was exiled to Old Bukhara. There he first worked as a photographer and then as a researcher at the Bukhara museum; in 1939–1948 he was on the staff of the Samarkand regional museum, and in 1948 he was sent to Dzhambul (Kazakhstan), where he taught drawing at a school and later worked at the regional museum. He was rehabilitated in 1954.

From 1954 Rempel lived in Tashkent, working at the Institute of Art Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and, from 1955, heading its department of architecture, fine and applied arts. In 1957–1961 he led the chair of art history and theory at the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. He received the degree of Doctor of Art Studies in 1963 and the title of professor in 1966.

Together with G. A. Pugachenkova he organised expeditions to study the early architecture of Bukhara, Fergana, Samarkand and other places in the republic, including all of its surviving mosques. His main works include “Panjara”, “Architectural Ornament of Uzbekistan”, “The History of the Arts of Uzbekistan from Ancient Times to the Mid-19th Century”, “Far and Near” and “The Chain of Times”. In 1966 he and Pugachenkova received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR for the history of the arts of Uzbekistan; the same year he was named Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR.

In 1990 Rempel settled in Moscow. He died there on 27 April 1992 and is buried in the Vostryakovo cemetery. His memoirs “My Contemporaries”, written in Moscow, were published in Tashkent that same year.