famous Irina Antonova: Pushkin Museum

Irina Antonova (1922-2020) was born in working-class Moscow. Dad Alexander Antonov trained as an electrician, and was an early member of the Bolshevik party from 1906. Her Lithuanian mother, Ida Heifetz, studied to be a singer then met Alexander in Kharkov Ukraine in the Civil War. Alexander was frequently absent and unfaithful. In 1929 he took the 7-year-old Irina and her half-sister with him when he was posted to the Soviet embassy in Berlin, living there for 4 years until Hitler took power. This Jewish family would have felt the danger.

  

Irina Antonova

Back in Moscow, Antonova was at school until 1940, when she en­rolled in art history at Moscow State Uni. 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 interview with a former British ambassador Braithwaite for his book Moscow 1941. The train was heavily bombed 10km outside Moscow. Everyone rushed for shelter into the surrounding wood. 

When they reached Samara there was nowhere for them to live, so she and her mother spent the winter in a railway sleeping car. In Jan 1942, after German troops started to retreat following heroic resis­tance in Moscow, she and her mother returned to the city. Irina was not considered an essential worker, so she hid in the luggage rack when the pat­rols came round the train, and also managed to evade them at the Moscow station.

Working as a nurse, she returned to Moscow Uni and on graduation in 1945, joined the staff of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts where she spent many decades. One of her first jobs was to help in storing art collections taken from Germany by the vict­or­ious Red Army. They included a hoard of golden crowns and jew­ellery excavated by Hein­rich Schliemann in Troy, as well as 700+ pictures from the Dresden Gallery in East Germany. The Dresden pieces were returned in 1955. The Trojan works remain in Moscow.

Thanks to her Bolshevik father, Irina had a history that made it easier for her to negotiate with Soviet cultural bureau­crats. One challenge was the housing of the huge collection of French impres­s­ionist pictures by Matisse, Monet, Gauguin and 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 grew and the pictures were divided up between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage in Leningrad.

In 1947 she married a fellow Jew and art hist­orian, Yevsei Rotenberg (d2011) and they had a son in 1954.

In 1961 Antonova was given a huge boost by Khrushchev’s cul­ture minister, Yekaterina Furtseva, whose force of character matched her own. Antonova was appointed the Pushkin Museum’s Director. She loved organising an ex­hib­ition of 100 paintings from the Metropol­it­an Museum of Art in N.Y and the exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamen. 

Cezanne and Gauguin exhibition

As Director, Irina was a passionate ex­ponent of the close links bet­ween Russian and Western European cul­ture. She expanded the museum’s display of Im­pressionist and Modern­ist art works, many of which had been kept hid­den in vaults by earlier directors. Pushing against Soviet polit­ical orth­od­oxy, she coll­ab­or­ated with mus­eums in Berlin and Paris to put on exhibitions that showed how Russian and European artists influenced each other.

And she ensured that the Pushkin Museum exhibited abstract and avant-garde works by Russian and international artists. That was improbable in a country whose leader Nikita Khrushchev, while visiting an exhibition of new Soviet art in 1962, shouted abuse about abstract paintings!!

Irina’s greatest pleasure was when she brought the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris in 1974. Hundreds of thousands of Russians lined up to see it!

Her position made her one of the Soviet Union’s leading public in­tell­ect­uals and often took her abroad to gatherings of other world-famous museum dir­ect­ors. In Paris she got to know Marc Chagall (1887-1985) 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, after Chagall’s death.

In 1981 Pushkin Museum hosted Moscow-Paris 1900-1930, a major exhib­ition that mixed works by French artists eg Matisse and Pic­asso with works of the Russian avant-garde eg Chagall, Malevich and Kand­insky. The exhibition showed how well Russian art­ists fitted in with Western European trends, and how they had helped form those trends.

 

Antonova and Chagall, 1973

Her success in charging through a bureaucracy was due to her strong person­ality and intel­ligence, coupled with her pub­lic ex­pressions of clear loyalty to Soviet ideology. In 1990 she made a keynote speech at the Communist party’s last cele­bration of the October Revolution. 

Antonova gave many public lectures around Europe, speak­ing fluent German, French and Italian. She felt closer to the art of mainland Europe than to Britain’s, but agreed to hold an ex­hib­i­tion of works by Henry Moore in the Pushkin Museum in 1991. Reactionaries mount­ed a coup against Gorbachev in Aug 1991, but fortunately the exhibition went ahead.

Following the fall of Communism, Antonova expanded the museum to adjacent buildings to house growing exhibitions. My personal fav­ourite ex­hib­ition was Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces of the Leiden Collection one of the largest coll­ect­ions of C17th Dutch paintings anywhere. By the time the exhib­ition was displayed in 2018, the Museum’s Director had retired.

Antonova was a leading art historian who led the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow for 50+ years, using it to bring out­side culture to passionate Soviet citizens and turning it into a major cultural institution. She died in 2020 at 98, from heart failure then coro­na­virus. At her funeral, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia President said Irina managed to surmount seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She shared the firm, unshakable and unbiased belief that for the arts’ development there must be a free dialogue between galleries and artists.

 

Thank you to Rosalind P. Blakesley, Irina’s curatorial coups.