Displaying items by tag: mikhail piotrovsky

Irina Antonova, the 91-year-old director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts who has helmed the institution for 52 years, has been let go after just recently renewing her five-year contract. The announcement, which was made on Monday, July 1, follows a battle waged by Antonova to bring a collection of Impressionist art, which was sent to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg by Joseph Stalin, back to Moscow.

Antonova’s vision was to restore the once magnificent State Museum of New West Art in Moscow, which housed paintings by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Stalin shuttered the museum in 1948 after his regime deemed the collection too far removed from Soviet art. The Museum of New Western Art’s collection, which was assembled by Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, was later divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.

Antonova first made her campaign public in April 2013 when she appealed to Russian president Vladimir Putin during a televised call-in show. The plea sparked controversy with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. After a heated battle, the state intervened and suggested creating an online “virtual museum” as a compromise between the two parties but Antonova refused.

Since the Pushkin’s announcement earlier this week, Antonova has been moved to the ceremonial post of the museum’s president. Marina Loshak, an established curator, will replace Antonova.

Officials at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia announced that the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will design a freestanding addition to the institution’s existing structure. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.

Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize winner, has designed Portugal’s Casa de Música, the Seattle Central Library and Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has worked with the Hermitage for over a decade and designed the fleeting Hermitage Guggenheim in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. Koolhaas has been working with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 2008 on a rearrangement of the museum’s existing interior. That project is expected to conclude in 2014 and will coincide with the museum’s 250^th anniversary.

The Hermitage’s new building will be located outside of St. Petersburg’s historic center. Contemporary architecture is banned from the area so to preserve the unity of the city’s aesthetic. The Koolhaas-designed structure will include a library, costume museum, a publishing house and various public spaces.