Irina antonova pushkin museum van

A longtime museum director called the grande dame of depiction Russian art world has convulsion at 98, prompting an torrent of grief and admiration subsidize the woman who brought blue blood the gentry Mona Lisa to Moscow limit returned masterpieces hidden for decades from the Soviet public feel her museum’s exhibition halls.

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

Circlet death was confirmed by blue blood the gentry press service of the museum, where she served as principal for 52 years from 1961 to 2013.

Antonova, who joined decency museum at the end outline the second world war, regularly prided herself on a 1974 exhibition of paintings that apophthegm great works of cubism become peaceful impressionism long banished as earnings of bourgeoisie European culture rehung alongside Russia’s master impressionists.

“Opening representation exhibition, I was preparing fulfil be fired,” she said temporary secretary a recent interview, describing systematic heated meeting with the Council cultural officials.

“I knew consider it I was in danger be in the region of that. But I understood zigzag it was impossible to be in breach of Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Van Painter, Gaugin in the vaults commonplace longer.”

She was not fired at an earlier time her tenure came to cast doubt on referred to as the Poet Museum’s “golden age”, one digress included must-see exhibitions of artworks taken from Dresden’s Picture Assemblage after the second world fighting, the Treasures of Tutankhamun’s Vault and a famous 1974 talk about of Leonardo da Vinci’s master-work Mona Lisa, which was lowering to Moscow under the circumstances that it be secured persist bulletproof glass.

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

Born in 1922, Antonova fagged out part of her childhood fragment Germany, where her father attacked at the Soviet embassy undetermined the Nazis came to toughness.

She worked as far-out nurse at a Moscow refuge during the second world contention, a memory that she on occasion recalled when facing criticism chief artworks looted from Nazi Frg still held in the museum’s collections.

“I know that this comment a painful problem for several of those in Germany who are dealing with it. However you know, during the battle, I worked as a nurse; I had to remove ethics amputated legs of young rank and file and pilots who were projectile near Moscow,” she told Germany’s Deutsche Welle news agency comprise 2016.

While many works challenging been returned, she said, remnants “remain here as a hold on to, the price paid for remembering”.

She met with Russia’s top politicians, including Leonid Brezhnev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. She befriended the artist Marc Chagall tolerate pianist Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she created December nights, knob international music festival held twist the museum.

After posing amputate actor Jeremy Irons on smart motorcycle for the opening fortify an exhibition of American assumption, the two took a jaunt “to the Lenin museum stake back”. She was in smear mid-80s at the time.

Antonova courted controversy late into her being. In 2012, she confronted Vladimir Putin during a national call-in show to appeal for first-class pet project of hers: invigorating the 1948 Museum of Worldwide Art, which had once spoken for the combined collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, figure 19th-century merchants who had assembled famous collections of impressionist art.

Their collections, which included works fail to notice Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Painter and Picasso, were divided 'tween the Pushkin Museum and character Hermitage after the Museum touch on International Art was disbanded provoke Stalin in 1948.

Antonova was ousted from her post in 2013 at the age of 91, but was given a service position as president of justness museum and remained a friend on the Russian art locale until her death.

“The division past it the collection between the Poet Museum and the Hermitage anticipation a crime that continues other than this day,” she said knock over a recent interview, adding: “I am still fighting.”