Full Name: Antonova, Irina Aleksandrovna
Other Names:
- Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova
- Ири́на Алекса́ндровна Анто́нова
Date Born: 20 March 1922
Date Died: 30 November 2020
Place Died: Moscow, Russia
Overview
Russian art historian, cultural administrator; Director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, 1961-2013. Antonova was born to Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Antonov, a trained electrician. As an early member of the Bolshevik party (joining 1906) he rose in the Soviet hierarchy, eventually a director of the Institute of Experimental Glass. Her mother, Ida Mikhailovna Heifitz, was Lithuanian, educated as a singer but only found factory work. In 1929 he took Antonova and a half sister (from a liaison outside the marriage) to Berlin where he worked in the Soviet Embassy. When Hitler assumed power, the three returned to Russia in 1933. She entered the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (college) in 1940. The following year the Institute was incorporated into the Moscow State University, officially known as the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University. She studied art history under some of the most prominent Soviet scholars, among them Boris Vipper (1888-1967). However when war broke out with Germany, she and her mother trained to be nurses. They fled as part of the evacuation of Moscow in 1940 and only returned in 1942. She continued her art-history studies and after graduating in 1945 was hired at the Pushkin Museum.
In 1947 she married a fellow art historian, Yevsei Rotenberg (1920-2011).
As a museum staffer, she witnessed in 1945 the arrival of art to the Pushkin that the Red Army had taken from Germany as war booty. Included among these were the Schliemann discovery of the so-called Priam’s Treasury, and many masterpieces from Dresden. The retaining of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie collection became a post-war issue. At first she publicly denied that the Dresden collections were held at all. When that became untenable, she insisted the collection was reparations for Russia’s hardships of the War, insisting that the Soviet Union legally held them, exempting them from restitution. As Dresden was now located in East Germany, part of the Russian states, most of the collection was returned to the Dresden museum in 1955. The Priam’s Treasure, taken from Berlin, was never returned.
Despite presiding over the museum during the most intense years of the Cold War, she opened up the Pushkin to the west, organizing shows both to the museum and lending works out to the west, many for the first time. In 1948 she oversaw the incorporation and distribution of the modern art collections expropriated by Stalin from collectors Sergei Shchokin (1854-1936)and Ivan Morozov (1871-1921). She continued to work at the Pushkin researching and writing on Italian Renaissance and Early Modern painting. Her research in provenance, attribution, and display methodology brought her to the attention of the culture minister under Khrushchev, Yekaterina Furtseva (1910-1974), who convinced him to name her director in 1961, significantly above other candidates. Her new post made her one of the Soviet Union’s leading public intellectuals (Guardian).
As director, she had to navigate the politics of a Soviet museum. Her friendship with pianist Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) convinced him to form an international music festival in Moscow as he was doing in Paris at the Louvre. However, when she pushed for a comprehensive museum of western European art including the Shchokin and Morozov works, the powerful Hermitage director, Mikhail Piotrovsky (b. 1944), launched a public campaign against it. A multi-building complex, Piotrovsky argued, would diminish the Hermitage. Her accusation that those against it were Stalinist in their thinking led to culture ministry disapproval. She also attacked the government’s plan for an online “virtual museum”. Antonova was relieved of her directorship in 2013 and succeeded by Marina Loshak (b. 1955). A new position, called the Pushkin museum president, was created for her, though largely titular. Her husband died in 2011. A nationalist even after her deposition, she publicly supported Russia’s invading of Ukraine.
She succumbed to COVID-19 complications and died near the end of 2020.
Selected Bibliography
Works published in Roman characters
- and Voznesenskiĭ, Andreĭ, et al. Chagall Discovered : From Russian and Private Collections. New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates/Macmillan, 1988;
- and Adaskina, N. L., Berlin Moskau, 1900-1950 = Moskva Berlin, 1900-1950; Munich/New York: Prestel, 1995;
- and Tolstikov, Vladimir P; Treister, Michail Yu, et. al. The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer’s Fabled City. New York: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts/H.N. Abrams,1996;
- and Eyerman, Charlotte Nalle; Georgievskai︠a︡, E. B., Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from The State Pushkin Museum, Moscow. New Haven: Yale University/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002;
- La Peinture Francaise, Musée Pouchkine Moscou. Martigny, Switzerland: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 2005.
Sources
- [obituaries] “Irina Antonova obituary.” The Guardian. Dec 10, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/dec/10/irina-antonova-obituary;
- Braithwaite, Rodric. Moscow 1941: a City and Its People At War. New York: Knopf, 2006.