MOSCOW, July 1 (Itar-Itass) - Irina Antonova, an expert on arts and museum administration who has stood at the head of Moscow's world-famous Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts since 1961 has moved to the position of president of the same museum, Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky said Monday at a meeting with the museum's staff.

"The main item on discussion here today is Irina Antonova's transfer to the position of the museum's President," he said. "We're immensely thankful to her. There's no one in the world today to boast a service record like hers."

He also said that the director's position has been filled and he introduced the new director, Marina Loshak.

“Our beloved museum will have a bright future,” Loshak told the staff members. “I hope we’ll be able to do everything for its development.”

“We’re not saying good-bye to Irina Alexandrovna /the second word being Antonova’s patronymic, a mandatory element in officials communications in Russian - Itar-Tass/ and each of us is looking forward to her advice and balanced assessments,” she said. “What really matters is that we want a future and that we want to make the museum still better and still more advanced.”

Marina Loshak is a very well-known gallery owner, arts manager and museum worker. She is also known to be one of the biggest experts of Russian art nouveau.

Her past career includes work at the Odessa State Museum of Literature. In 1986, she moved to Moscow to take up a job at the Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum.

Loshak has worked in the position of directors of the Moscow Center for Fine Arts on Neglinnaya Street, where she organized several exhibitions of Russian avant-garde.

In July 2012, Loshak became the arts director of a large museum amalgamation, which embraced the places as remarkable as the Manezh exhibition hall, the Working Man and the Peasant Woman monument exhibition, and Anton Chekhov’s memorial house.

Vladimir Medinsky admitted that the decision on replacing Dr Antonova, a person of unquestionable renown and authority throughout the world of Russian culture, had been taken by the Ministry of Culture.

“But the Pushkin Museum is a very special type of museum and that’s why some coordination was needed,” he said. “We needed experts’ opinions and assessments on the part of the museum community.”

Medinsky declined to explain, however, why the ministry’s choice had fallen on Marina Loshak. “An answer to this question might take up a couple of hours,” he said.