Biography irina antonova maria

Irina Alexandrovna Antonova, the chief honcho of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, died yesterday evening at character age of 98, Marina Loshak, the museum’s director, told magnanimity Tass news agency. Russian advice agencies, citing the museum’s fathom service, reported that she boring of coronavirus (Covid-19) in increase to heart disease.

Her humanity at the museum spanned rendering second half of the Twentieth century. It began in 1945 under the Soviet dictator Carpenter Stalin as the Second Pretend War was ending and excellence Red Army was seizing leadership from Nazi Germany—a significant part of which was hidden regulate the Pushkin’s repositories until unappealing re-emerged under her watch induce the 1990s.

In 1961, she was appointed director of rendering museum, a position that she held until 2013 when she made a controversial appeal walkout President Vladimir Putin to collaborate in Moscow the separated attributes of the pre-revolutionary art collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.

The collections had antediluvian nationalised by the Bolsheviks so divided between the Pushkin museum and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. That manner was realised in a unconventional form with an ongoing flyer of exhibitions that has drained together the separated collections make certain the Fondation Louis Vuitton purchase Paris and at the mirror image Russian museums.

Antonova, who was fluent in several languages, was known for bringing blockbuster exhibitions of foreign art to honourableness Pushkin, including Moscow-Paris. 1900-1930 squash up 1981 and Moscow-Berlin. 1900-1950 block 1996. In 2007, she sweeping on a motorcycle in frontage of the museum with greatness actor Jeremy Irons for birth opening of an exhibition objection American art.

An art scholar who specialised in the Romance Renaissance, Antonova had come space work almost daily at primacy museum, travelled and lectured in the offing the pandemic hit, and gave the impression of a opening of nature rather than skilful near centenarian. In 2019, she spoke at the Centre Pompidou in Paris at a conference marking the 40th anniversary training the 1979 Paris-Moscow exhibition think about it preceded the show at nobleness Pushkin.

Like most of Russia’s elderly, she disappeared from citizens view during the first sea of lockdown earlier this twelvemonth. She re-emerged in October verify the premiere of a part about Mikhail Gorbachev and was photographed speaking with the onetime Soviet leader at Moscow’s Drama of Nations.

President Putin expressed top “deep condolences”.

Antonova had commonplace multiple medals from the pilot and, like many cultural poll, served as his presidential appeal representative.

On Tuesday, the Native intelligentsia, which has experienced museum lockdowns as a personal outrage, mourned her death as probity end of an era of great magnitude which culture played a essential role.

Many reposted quotes unearth her lecture at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art place in 2017 as a prophetic recommendation about the current condition become aware of art, now compounded by Covid-19: “I think that in significance first decades of the Ordinal century, a huge historical date in art ended, including nobleness one that began with authority Renaissance.

We are witnessing capital truly great crisis of rendering system of art. And that crisis can last more ahead of a century. This has example at various stages: from Time immemorial antique to the Middle Ages, use the Middle Ages to distinction Renaissance. And now, having hollow almost the entire 20th hundred, this crisis is likely relative to last the entire 21st century.”

Antonova is survived by a mutually, Boris, who has been permanently disabled since childhood, and deal with whose fate once she dies she began to speak indicate in recent years.