The legendary director of the Pushkin Museum has a toponymic monument

The square near the Pushkin Museum named after Irina Antonova

The centenary year of Irina Antonova, who passed away two years ago, is marked by a series of events dedicated to the memory of the legendary director of the Pushkin Museum. One of them was the creation of a toponymic memorial. Now the nameless square with tall trees in front of the main entrance to the museum was named after Irina Antonova.

The idea to name the square in front of the facade of the museum building after Irina Aleksandrovna – and this is essentially a “visiting card”, a postcard viewpoint – appeared among the employees. Visitors to the Pushkin Museum supported the initiative. And the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, approved the idea by a separate order.

“The initiative to capture the name of Irina Alexandrovna in the toponymy of the city received an incredible response. After all, she was not only a brilliant art critic. Irina Antonova devotedly and selflessly served the Pushkin Museum for more than 70 years, promoted its collections for decades, developed cooperation with institutions across the country and around the world,” the Pushkin Museum said. Pushkin.

Irina Antonova came to work at the Pushkin Museum at the end of World War II, when she was still studying at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, History and Literature. Professor Boris Robertovich Vipper invited her as an art critic – a specialist in the Italian Renaissance. And in 1961, Antonova took the director’s chair and made a real revolution. She managed to restore the unique glass roofs over the Italian courtyard, which were broken during the Second World War. Arrange for the showing of “La Gioconda” in Moscow. To hold a series of exhibitions that turned the idea of ​​the art of the twentieth century. The project “Moscow-Paris: 1900-1930” is called epoch-making – then the public was able to see the masterpieces of the avant-garde for the first time after a long oblivion. Irina Antonova served as director of the Pushkin Museum for 52 years, and after that, and until the end of her days, she continued to deal with museum affairs as president of Pushkinsky.

Many large-scale projects were conceived by Irina Antonova. Many have incarnated, but not all. For example, she dreamed that the Pushkin Museum would be renamed and named after its founder and first director, Professor Irina Tsvetaeva. This did not happen, but the idea of ​​perpetuating the memory with the help of “named” places, reminiscent of the people who made Pushkinsky himself, took root.