Irina Alexandrovna Antonova

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Irina Alexandrovna Antonowa ( Russian Ирина Александровна Антонова ; born March 20, 1922 in Moscow ; † November 30, 2020 ibid) was a Russian art historian . From 1961 to 2013 she was director and from 2013 president of the Moscow Pushkin Museum .

Irina Antonova (2014)

Life

Irina Antonowa studied at the Lomonossow University in Moscow under Boris Wipper and graduated in 1945. She also trained as a nurse during World War II and worked in the hospital. Then she started working as an employee in the Pushkin Museum. There it was used to unload the looted art arriving from Germany . She also helped with unpacking and inventorying the Priam treasure and the collection of the Dresden Old Masters Picture Gallery . The latter was restored and returned to Dresden on June 3, 1956.

In 1961 Antonova was appointed director of the museum by Nikita Khrushchev . In this position she founded the Svyatoslav Richter ’s December Nights music festival in 1981 , which is held annually. Antonova kept the existence of the Troy Gold and other “trophy art” a secret in her museum for a long time and reacted angrily to publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She refused the return of the cultural treasures and said in this context that there were no more claims. In a television documentary broadcast on 3sat and ZDF with the title The Lost Treasures of Museum Island , Irina Antonova answered the question why she had remained silent about the looted art depots for so long: "You journalists haven't asked me once!" Despite her rigid stance on the return of cultural assets, she made many of the objects accessible to the public again in exhibitions. On July 1, 2013, she handed over the position of director to Marina Loschak and took over the newly created post of President of the Pushkin Museum.

Antonova was married to the art historian Yevsei Iossifowitsch Rotenberg . She died in Moscow at the age of 98.

Awards

Web links

Commons : Irina Antonowa  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Раскрыты подробности смерти президента Пушкинского музея Ирины Антоновой (Russian)
  2. ↑ Konstantin Akinscha, Grigori Koslow: booty art. On a treasure hunt in Russian secret depots. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1995. Page 333
  3. ↑ Interview with Martin Roth from August 30, 2007 on Deutschlandradio, accessed on March 17, 2007 on dradio.de
  4. ↑ Discussion of the documentation on welt.de, accessed on March 17, 2008
  5. ↑ Announcement about the appointment of Irina Antonova as President of the Pushkin Museum (Russian)
personal data
SURNAME Antonova, Irina Alexandrovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Антонова, Ирина Александровна
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet and Russian art historian and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 2020
Place of death Moscow