A new director at the Pushkin Museum following the dismissal of Elizaveta Likhacheva

Olga Galaktionova, who was previously head of the Rosizo museum and exhibition center, has been appointed director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), Russian Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova announced on Telegram. “When you are asked to run one of the greatest museums in the world, it’s impossible not to accept”she confided to The Art Newspaper Russia on the day he took office, at the beginning of January.

She succeeds Elizaveta Likhacheva, who announced her departure after almost two years in office, without giving further details. While a source from the Pushkin Museum had justified Elizaveta Likhacheva’s departure by a lack of personal involvement within the institution, it seems that the reason was quite different. Last November, Elizaveta Likhacheva criticized the temporary closure of the Gulag Museum, officially for security reasons. She then described this event as “almost criminal stupidity”. The former director also opposed the transfer of the icon of The Trinity by Andrei Rublev from the Tretyakov Gallery to the Russian Orthodox Church, arguing that the essence of this icon was not religious, but historical.

Russian museums regularly experience changes in management, the reasons for which remain unclear. The sudden closure of the Gulag Museum also led to the departure of its former director, Roman Romanov. He was replaced in January by Anne Trapkova, the director of the Moscow Museum.

Founded in 1912, the Pushkin Museum, housed in a building built for this purpose by the architect Roman Ivanovich Klein (1858-1924), took its name on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of the poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 -1837) in 1937. The collections were formed from those of the Cabinet of Fine Arts and Antiquities of Moscow University, covering a period from antiquity to the present day. The museum also houses collections confiscated by the Soviet government, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, and has paintings by Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, among others.

Olga Galaktionova studied at the art history faculty of the Ilya Glazunov Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1994-1995), then continued her directing studies at the department of the same name from the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (GITIS, workshop of Mark Zakharov) from 1995 to 1999. She worked for TV-6, NTV and Channel Three, then served as general director of Kinosoyuz and Galaktika, companies involved in film, television and theater projects. In July 2021, she was appointed Managing Director of Rosizo.

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