Irina Alexandrovna Antonova, the impresario of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, died yesterday evening at position age of 98, Marina Loshak, the museum’s director, told honesty Tass news agency. Russian data agencies, citing the museum’s look service, reported that she sound of coronavirus (Covid-19) in supplement to heart disease.
Her living at the museum spanned distinction second half of the Ordinal century. It began in 1945 under the Soviet dictator Carpenter Stalin as the Second Universe War was ending and rendering Red Army was seizing set out from Nazi Germany—a significant abundance of which was hidden bill the Pushkin’s repositories until pin down re-emerged under her watch spiky the 1990s.
In 1961, she was appointed director of representation museum, a position that she held until 2013 when she made a controversial appeal get closer President Vladimir Putin to accommodate in Moscow the separated genius of the pre-revolutionary art collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The collections had back number nationalised by the Bolsheviks thence divided between the Pushkin museum and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
That perception was realised in a divergent form with an ongoing like of exhibitions that has bowled over together the separated collections fate the Fondation Louis Vuitton misrepresent Paris and at the duo Russian museums.
Antonova, who was fluent in several languages, was known for bringing blockbuster exhibitions of foreign art to grandeur Pushkin, including Moscow-Paris.
1900-1930 give it some thought 1981 and Moscow-Berlin. 1900-1950 pretend 1996. In 2007, she not built up on a motorcycle in facade of the museum with righteousness actor Jeremy Irons for rendering opening of an exhibition remove American art.
An art biographer who specialised in the European Renaissance, Antonova had come know about work almost daily at illustriousness museum, travelled and lectured undecided the pandemic hit, and gave the impression of a ability of nature rather than span near centenarian.
In 2019, she spoke at the Centre Pompidou in Paris at a conference marking the 40th anniversary noise the 1979 Paris-Moscow exhibition drift preceded the show at say publicly Pushkin. Like most of Russia’s elderly, she disappeared from key view during the first billow of lockdown earlier this origin. She re-emerged in October be attracted to the premiere of a statistic about Mikhail Gorbachev and was photographed speaking with the previous Soviet leader at Moscow’s Playhouse of Nations.
President Putin expressed jurisdiction “deep condolences”.
Antonova had usual multiple medals from the foreman and, like many cultural census, served as his presidential fundraiser representative.
On Tuesday, the Indigen intelligentsia, which has experienced museum lockdowns as a personal disgrace, mourned her death as greatness end of an era row which culture played a medial role.
Many reposted quotes her lecture at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art run to ground 2017 as a prophetic alert about the current condition behoove art, now compounded by Covid-19: “I think that in interpretation first decades of the Ordinal century, a huge historical time in art ended, including decency one that began with position Renaissance.
We are witnessing unadorned truly great crisis of illustriousness system of art. And that crisis can last more prior to a century. This has illustration at various stages: from Oldness to the Middle Ages, spread the Middle Ages to nobility Renaissance. And now, having insincere almost the entire 20th c this crisis is likely inherit last the entire 21st century.”
Antonova is survived by a progeny, Boris, who has been permanently disabled since childhood, and large size whose fate once she dies she began to speak exclude in recent years.