Konrad Oberhuber

drawings expert

Konrad Oberhuber, curator of drawings and professor of fine arts from 1975 to 1987, died of brain cancer on Sept. 12 in San Diego. He was 72 years old. Born in Linz, Austria, he studied at the University of Vienna, and worked for a decade at the Albertina, the renowned Viennese museum. Before coming to Harvard he served as curator at the National Gallery of Art. When he left Cambridge in 1987, it was to return to the Albertina as its director, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. As an art historian, Oberhuber was best known as the world's pre-eminent authority on the drawings of Raphael, but his expertise extended beyond the Italian Renaissance in many directions and across five centuries. In every European and American museum collection he visited, he correctly attributed unidentified and misidentified drawings by French, Netherlandish, Italian, and German draftsmen. As the most prominent expert in the United States on Renaissance drawings, during the 1970s and 1980s Oberhuber was inundated with requests for help from students, scholars, collectors, dealers, and auction houses. Not only did he nurture Harvard undergraduates and graduate students, but he also served formally and informally as surrogate adviser to Ph.D. candidates from other institutions.