- Born
- Died
- Birth nameIrina Alexandrovna Antonova
- Irina Antonova was born on March 20, 1922 in Moscow, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. She was married to Yevsei Iossifowitsch Rotenberg. She died on November 30, 2020 in Moscow, Russia.
- SpouseYevsei Iossifowitsch Rotenberg(? - October 15, 2011) (his death, 1 child)
- She helped to promote the works of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky, who were regarded as traitors for having left the Soviet Union for the West.
- During WWII, she worked at an ammunition factory and as a nurse at a military hospital.
- She was an art historian who headed up the Pushkin Museum in Moscow for more than 50 years. She joined the staff at the Pushkin after graduating from Moscow State University in 1945, a month before the end of WWII. She became the director in 1961 and remained in that role until 2013, when she became president. Her field of expertise was the Italian Renaissance.
- For so many years, we weren't allowed to exhibit what we had in our collections. Renoir, Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne were considered formalistic and bourgeois artists. [describing the Stalin-era emphasis on Socialist Realism in art]
- Politicians come and go, but art is eternal.
- ... I haven't lost faith in socialism to this day. It's obvious that Stalin was a tyrant. We chose the wrong path to socialism in the Soviet Union. But that doesn't mean that the idea is worthless.
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