Determined fighter for artistic expression
Russian art director
IRINA ANTONOVA spent more than half a century as director of the renowned Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
She died on November 30, aged 98.
A passionate exponent of the close links between Russian and western European culture, she expanded the museum’s display of impressionist and modernist artworks, many of which had been kept hidden in the vaults by earlier directors. Pushing against censorship and political orthodoxy during the Soviet period, she dared to collaborate with museums in Berlin and Paris to put on exhibitions that showed how Russian, German and French avantgarde painters had influenced each other.
Her success in challenging official thinking and navigating her way through an oppressive bureaucracy was due to her formidable personality, intellectual strength and resilience, coupled with public expressions of extravagant loyalty to Soviet ideology. In 1990 she was chosen to make a keynote speech at the Communist party’s last celebration of the October revolution of 1917 before the party disbanded.
Antonova was born in Moscow to a workingclass family. Her father, Alexander Antonov, who trained as an electrician, was an early member of the Bolshevik party, joining it in 1906. Her mother, Ida Mihailovna Heifetz, who was born in Lithuania, studied to be a singer but initially only found work as a cleaner in a printing works. They met each other in Kharkov, in Ukraine, during the civil war but the marriage was fragile.
Alexander was frequently absent and then started a second family. But in 1929 he took the 7yearold Irina and her halfsister with him when he was posted to the Soviet embassy in Berlin. They lived in Germany for four years until Hitler came to power.
Back in Moscow, Antonova continued her schooling until 1940, when she enrolled as a student of art history at Moscow State University. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941 she started training as a nurse. Four months later she and her mother joined the mass evacuation of Muscovites to the Urals. It was a horrific experience, which Antonova graphically described in a 2003 interview with a former British ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, for his book
Moscow 1941.
The train was heavily bombed about 10km outside Moscow. Everyone rushed for shelter into the surrounding wood, but Irina remained in the train to comfort a heavily pregnant woman.
When they reached Kuibyshev (now Samara) there was nowhere for them to live, so she and her mother spent the winter in a railway sleeping car, cooking and washing in the open. In January 1942, after German troops started to retreat following heroic resistance on the outskirts of Moscow, she and her mother returned to the city.
Not being considered an essential worker, Irina was supposed to remain in Kuibyshev, but with typical determination and courage she hid in the luggage rack when the patrols came round the train, and also managed to evade them at the Moscow station.
Working parttime as a nurse she returned to university in Moscow and on graduation in 1945 joined the staff of the Pushkin Museum, where she spent the next 75 years. One of her first jobs was to help in storing art collections taken from Germany by the victorious Red Army. They included Priam’s Treasure, the hoard of golden crowns and jewellery excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in Troy, as well as more than 700 pictures from the Dresden gallery. The Dresden pieces were returned in 1955 to the city, which was in communistcontrolled East Germany. The Trojan works remain in Moscow.
Another challenge was the housing of the huge collection of mainly French impressionist pictures (Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Derain) bought before the revolution by two millionaire merchants from Moscow, Sergei Shchokin and Ivan Morozov. They were expropriated by the Soviet government under Lenin and housed in the State Museum of Modern Western Art. The museum was disbanded by Stalin in 1948 as the Cold War developed, and the pictures were dispersed between the Pushkin museum and the Hermitage in Leningrad.
In 1961 Antonova was given a massive promotion by Khrushchev’s culture minister, Yekaterina Furtseva, whose fearlessness and force of character matched her own. Antonova was appointed the Pushkin museum’s director.
Her new post made her one of the Soviet Union’s leading public intellectuals and frequently took her abroad to gatherings of directors of other worldfamous museums.
In Paris she got to know Marc Chagall, after the director of the Louvre introduced them. She fought hard to hold an exhibition of Chagall’s work in Moscow, but it was only under Mikhail Gorbachev’s more liberal regime that it was finally held in 1987, a year after Chagall’s death.
Paris was also the place where she persuaded the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter to organise an international music festival in Moscow. He was already giving regular recitals in the Louvre, and in 1981, under Antonova’s patronage, started an annual festival in the halls of the Pushkin museum called Sviatoslav Richter’s December Nights, which she continued after his death in 1997.
Antonova gave numerous public lectures in Russia and abroad, and spoke fluent German, French and Italian.
She always felt closer to the art of mainland Europe than Britain, but she agreed to hold an exhibition of works by Henry Moore in the Pushkin museum in 1991. It almost had to be cancelled when Communist Party reactionaries mounted a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, but the coup collapsed.
Antonova’s one conspicuous failure concerned her ambition to bring the Shchokin and Morozov pictures back under one roof, as they had been when Lenin nationalised them. She tackled every Russian leader on the issue, including Vladimir Putin at one of his live phoneins with members of the Russian public. But the director of the Hermitage was against the project and the paintings remain to be enjoyed in Russia’s two most visited cities.
In 2013, at the age of 91, Antonova was finally persuaded to take the newly created and largely honorific role as the Pushkin museum’s president and give up the directorship.
In 1947 she married a fellow art historian, Yevsei Rotenberg; he died in 2011. Their son, Boris, survives her. — Guardian News and Media