Antonova has been criticized by Westerners for having denied the existence of the artworks, but she has insisted that after she became museum director in 1961, she and a small number of curators approached the government more than once about making the treasures public but were always turned down.
The display surprised the art world by affirming the existence of masterpieces once thought lost forever or destroyed, but it also raised troubling questions about ownership and revived tangled moral, legal, diplomatic and political issues dating to World War II.
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Not until four years ago was there ever any evidence that the plundered Nazi art treasures still existed. Last year, Russian museums began to acknowledge that they had some of the missing artwork, announcing that there would be several exhibits of the art confiscated from the Nazis, both at the Pushkin and the great State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. But last week's exhibit came without warning, and it provoked harsh reaction from German officials, who had been quietly negotiating to get back the war plunder for almost five years.
Moreover, Antonova, who is said to remember the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trumpeted the exhibit as a 50-year celebration of the Russian victory over Germany. She condemned the German troops that destroyed 400 Russian museums and monuments, and told reporters: "We are in a position that such damage should be compensated."
One of the problems is that some of the paintings, including works by Renoir, Degas, Goya, El Greco and others, were not merely spoils of war raided
