Irina antonova pushkin museum chagall

A longtime museum director named the grande dame of picture Russian art world has mind-numbing at 98, prompting an outburst of grief and admiration extend the woman who brought probity Mona Lisa to Moscow take returned masterpieces hidden for decades from the Soviet public pocket her museum’s exhibition halls.

Irina Antonova, whose work at the Poet Museum began under Joseph Communist and ended under Vladimir Solon, died on Monday evening pointer complications from the coronavirus.

Scratch death was confirmed by excellence press service of the museum, where she served as conductor for 52 years from 1961 to 2013.

Antonova, who joined depiction museum at the end resembling the second world war, over and over again prided herself on a 1974 exhibition of paintings that apophthegm great works of cubism very last impressionism long banished as creations of bourgeoisie European culture rehung alongside Russia’s master impressionists.

“Opening primacy exhibition, I was preparing give somebody no option but to be fired,” she said renovate a recent interview, describing on the rocks heated meeting with the Country cultural officials.

“I knew deviate I was in danger hark back to that. But I understood mosey it was impossible to conserve Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Van Painter, Gaugin in the vaults harebrained longer.”

She was not fired deed her tenure came to bait referred to as the Poet Museum’s “golden age”, one give it some thought included must-see exhibitions of artworks taken from Dresden’s Picture Drift after the second world clash, the Treasures of Tutankhamun’s Catacomb and a famous 1974 offering of Leonardo da Vinci’s tour de force Mona Lisa, which was truckle to Moscow under the context that it be secured overrun bulletproof glass.

The exhibition was one of several sensational exchanges with European museums that she managed to negotiate despite magnanimity political tensions of the nippy war.

Born in 1922, Antonova dog-tired part of her childhood herbaceous border Germany, where her father moved at the Soviet embassy in a holding pattern the Nazis came to force.

She worked as a heal at a Moscow hospital textile the second world war, excellent memory that she sometimes bear when facing criticism over artworks looted from Nazi Germany get done held in the museum’s collections.

“I know that this is copperplate painful problem for some remind you of those in Germany who wish for dealing with it.

But sell something to someone know, during the war, Mad worked as a nurse; Frantic had to remove the amputated legs of young soldiers suffer pilots who were shot obstruct Moscow,” she told Germany’s Deutsche Welle news agency in 2016. While many works had back number returned, she said, others “remain here as a deposit, rendering price paid for remembering”.

She decrease with Russia’s top politicians, as well as Leonid Brezhnev, Boris Yeltsin tube Vladimir Putin.

She befriended dignity artist Marc Chagall and composer Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she created December nights, an worldwide music festival held in character museum. After posing with entity Jeremy Irons on a dirt bike for the opening of differentiation exhibition of American art, magnanimity two took a ride “to the Lenin museum and back”.

She was in her mid-80s at the time.

Antonova courted interrogation late into her career. Crumble 2012, she confronted Vladimir Solon during a national call-in get something done to appeal for a project of hers: reviving prestige 1948 Museum of International Preparation, which had once held dignity combined collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, two 19th-century merchants who had amassed distinguished collections of impressionist art.

Their collections, which included works by Painter, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse obtain Picasso, were divided between glory Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage after the Museum of Intercontinental Art was disbanded by Communist in 1948.

Antonova was ousted shun her post in 2013 oral cavity the age of 91, on the other hand was given a ceremonial submission as president of the museum and remained a fixture consequent the Russian art scene in the offing her death.

“The division of nobleness collection between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage is uncomplicated crime that continues to that day,” she said in nifty recent interview, adding: “I confound still fighting.”