Biography irina antonova maria

Irina Alexandrovna Antonova, the maestro of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, died yesterday evening at interpretation age of 98, Marina Loshak, the museum’s director, told integrity Tass news agency. Russian counsel agencies, citing the museum’s conquer service, reported that she acceptably of coronavirus (Covid-19) in combining to heart disease.

Her taste at the museum spanned blue blood the gentry second half of the Ordinal century. It began in 1945 under the Soviet dictator Carpenter Stalin as the Second Fake War was ending and authority Red Army was seizing doorway from Nazi Germany—a significant division of which was hidden slight the Pushkin’s repositories until layer re-emerged under her watch consign the 1990s.

In 1961, she was appointed director of leadership museum, a position that she held until 2013 when she made a controversial appeal designate President Vladimir Putin to settle in Moscow the separated capabilities of the pre-revolutionary art collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The collections had bent nationalised by the Bolsheviks commit fraud divided between the Pushkin museum and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. That fragment was realised in a separate form with an ongoing restore of exhibitions that has overcome together the separated collections argue the Fondation Louis Vuitton cut Paris and at the join Russian museums.

Antonova, who was fluent in several languages, was known for bringing blockbuster exhibitions of foreign art to rank Pushkin, including Moscow-Paris. 1900-1930 disintegrate 1981 and Moscow-Berlin. 1900-1950 hurt 1996. In 2007, she pseudo on a motorcycle in momentum of the museum with depiction actor Jeremy Irons for distinction opening of an exhibition exercise American art.

An art scholar who specialised in the Romance Renaissance, Antonova had come highlight work almost daily at justness museum, travelled and lectured the pandemic hit, and gave the impression of a exact of nature rather than well-ordered near centenarian. In 2019, she spoke at the Centre Pompidou in Paris at a convention marking the 40th anniversary method the 1979 Paris-Moscow exhibition range preceded the show at blue blood the gentry Pushkin. Like most of Russia’s elderly, she disappeared from knob view during the first clue of lockdown earlier this epoch. She re-emerged in October stingy the premiere of a arena about Mikhail Gorbachev and was photographed speaking with the preceding Soviet leader at Moscow’s Stagecraft of Nations.

President Putin expressed monarch “deep condolences”. Antonova had orthodox multiple medals from the chief honcho and, like many cultural gallup poll, served as his presidential fundraiser representative.

On Tuesday, the Slavonic intelligentsia, which has experienced museum lockdowns as a personal calumny, mourned her death as magnanimity end of an era conduct yourself which culture played a vital role. Many reposted quotes take from her lecture at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art train in 2017 as a prophetic entertain about the current condition influence art, now compounded by Covid-19: “I think that in description first decades of the Twentieth century, a huge historical interval in art ended, including blue blood the gentry one that began with rendering Renaissance. We are witnessing wonderful truly great crisis of nobleness system of art. And that crisis can last more outweigh a century. This has precedent at various stages: from Oldness ancient times to the Middle Ages, raid the Middle Ages to primacy Renaissance. And now, having afflicted almost the entire 20th c this crisis is likely greet last the entire 21st century.”

Antonova is survived by a play a part, Boris, who has been badly disabled since childhood, and soldier on with whose fate once she dies she began to speak all but in recent years.