The Russian government has refused to reunite the collections Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, which has stood as a point of contention between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg over the past months. Both institutions currently own parts of the collection, which was divided in half after Stalin shuttered the Museum of New Western Art in 1948. Former director of the Pushkin Museum Irina Antonova spoke out on the decision last week on Moscow television, stating a hope that the works would be reunited. “I believe that in the end common sense must triumph,” she said. “We will have a state that will understand what it is to have the kind of museum that we don’t have in Moscow, a top museum of world art in the capital.”
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