Charles Fabri
Hungarian art critic, writer, and Indologist
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Through Lahore
Early life and education
Károly Lajos Fábri was born on 18 November 1899 in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. He had one older brother and his father owned a chain of hotels. During the First World War, he served in the army, and after, as he began university, his family lost its fortune.
In 1924 Fabri completed a masters in philosophy, psychology and Germanic philology from the University of Pécs, and three years later gained a doctorate in philosophy. At university he also undertook a personal study of Indology and Indian art. He gained his PhD in philosophy in 1927.
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Career
Between 1927 and 1934 Fabri was curator of the Kern Institute Library, Leiden University. From 1930 to 1934 Fabri worked with Aurel Stein on the Archaeological Survey of India in India, and accompanied Stein to India in 1932 to work on the Indus Valley excavations.
1933-1936
In 1933 Rabindranath Tagore invited Fabri to teach art history at Santiniketan.
Lahore (1937)
Fabri became a British citien in 1937. That year he first met artist Amrita Sher-Gil in November, when as art critic for the Civil and Military Gazette, he reported on her solo exhibition held in the ballroom of Faletti's Hotel in Lahore, British India. There, with the assistance of Diwan Chaman Lall, Fabri acquired The Little Girl in Blue and it remained in his family until being sold in 2018. He also assisted in the sale of The Vina Player to the Lahore Museum. He wrote that "Miss Sher-Gil's oeuvre is essentially modern without being fantastic. Simplification and the grasping of important essentials are the key-note in most of her work and there is a certain quality of decorativeness in most of her canvases. Her most fascinating subjects are women and children." In an essay he wrote after her death, he called her a "miraculous marriage of Indian and Western, brought up in the discipline of western painting, suffused in her mental make-up with Indian feeling and attitudes".
1938 onwards
Between 1938 and 1945 he was director of the Punjab Exploration Fund.
Between 1945 and 1947 Fabri was curator of the Lahore Museum. In 1947 he married Ratna Mathur. He took up Indian citizenship in 1947. From 1947 to 1950 he lectured at the National Museum of India, New Delhi.
For The Statesman he became critic for dance, drama and art.
In 1947 Fabri published Indian Flamingo: A Novel of Modern India. Set in the 1930s it features a Lahore Museum director falling in love with a 23 year old painter based on Sher-Gil. The dedication in the book reads " to the beloved, undying memory of AMRITA and her sisters and brothers of the new India".
From 1950 to 1959 Fabri lectured at the Architecture and Art Departments of Delhi Polytechnic. His masterpiece, Fundamental: History of Indian Art (1956-1958), created with the assistance of the Bollingen Foundation, remains unpublished.
Death and legacy
Fabri died in July 1968, around two years after being diagnosed with throat cancer. He is remembered for his contributions to Indian art, and to recognising Odissi as a classical dance.