Russian museum director who exposed Soviets to hidden ...

A longtime museum director dubbed the grande dame of the Russian art world has died at ninety eight, prompting an outpouring of grief and admiration for the lady who brought the Mona Lisa to Moscow and again masterpieces hidden for a long time from the Soviet public to her museum's exhibition halls.

Irina Antonova, whose work on the Pushkin Museum all started under Joseph Stalin and ended below Vladimir Putin, died on Monday evening of problems from the coronavirus. Her demise was proven with the aid of the press service of the museum, where she served as director for 52 years from 1961 to 2013.

Antonova, who joined the museum at the conclusion of the second world warfare, commonly prided herself on a 1974 exhibition of art work that noticed extraordinary works of cubism and impressionism lengthy banished as items of bourgeoisie European lifestyle rehung alongside Russia's master impressionists.

"Opening the exhibition, i was getting ready to be fired," she referred to in a recent interview, describing a heated assembly with the Soviet cultural officers. "I knew that i used to be in danger of that. but I understood that it turned into impossible to preserve Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Van Gogh, Gaugin within the vaults any further."

She became no longer fired and her tenure got here to be stated as the Pushkin Museum's "golden age", one which protected ought to-see exhibitions of artworks taken from Dresden's picture Gallery after the 2d world warfare, the Treasures of Tutankhamun's Tomb and a noted 1974 exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece Mona Lisa, which turned into brought to Moscow beneath the situation that it's secured at the back of bulletproof glass. The exhibition turned into certainly one of a few sensational exchanges with European museums that she managed to negotiate despite the political tensions of the bloodless battle.

Irina Antonova and Marc Chagall in Paris within the 1970s. photograph: Igor Detinkin / Pushkin Museum

Born in 1922, Antonova spent part of her childhood in Germany, the place her father worked at the Soviet embassy until the Nazis got here to vigour. She labored as a nurse at a Moscow sanatorium all over the 2nd world battle, a reminiscence that she once in a while recalled when dealing with criticism over artworks looted from Nazi Germany nevertheless held in the museum's collections.

"i do know that here's a painful problem for a few of those in Germany who're coping with it. however you understand, throughout the war, I labored as a nurse; I had to remove the amputated legs of young soldiers and pilots who have been shot close Moscow," she informed Germany's Deutsche Welle information company in 2016. while many works had been returned, she stated, others "stay here as a deposit, the expense paid for remembering".

She met with Russia's exact politicians, including Leonid Brezhnev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. She befriended the artist Marc Chagall and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she created December nights, a global track festival held within the museum. After posing with actor Jeremy Irons on a motorcycle for the opening of an exhibition of yankee paintings, the two took a journey "to the Lenin museum and again". She become in her mid-80s on the time.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, talks with Irina Antonova in 2017. image: Mikhail Klimentyev/Tass/Getty pictures

Antonova courted controversy late into her career. In 2012, she confronted Vladimir Putin right through a country wide call-in show to attraction for a pet task of hers: reviving the 1948 Museum of foreign art, which had once held the mixed collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, two nineteenth-century retailers who had amassed famous collections of impressionist paintings.

Their collections, which blanketed works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso, have been divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage after the Museum of foreign artwork turned into disbanded by means of Stalin in 1948.

Antonova changed into ousted from her post in 2013 at the age of ninety one, however turned into given a ceremonial position as president of the museum and remained a fixture on the Russian art scene unless her death.

"The division of the assortment between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage is against the law that continues to this day," she spoke of in a fresh interview, adding: "i'm nonetheless fighting."