Washington-area artist Alexander Anufriev in 2016 with paintings he exhibited at the Barns of Rose Hill, a Virginia art center. (Ginger Perry/Winchester Star)

Alexander Anufriev (August 2, 1940 - October 17, 2024)

Alexander Anufriev, Soviet émigré and painter of angels, dies at 84

Harrison Smith (source Washington Post November 1, 2024)

Alexander Anufriev, a non-conformist artist from the Soviet Union who, after surviving a devastating earthquake in his 20s, spent decades making expressive, brightly colored paintings of a single otherworldly subject — angels — died Oct. 17 at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 84.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his wife, Tanya Anisimova, who served as a model for some of his pictures. The couple lived in the Kentlands section of Gaithersburg, Maryland, where Mr. Anufriev painted from his home studio until his health declined last year.

The son of a Russian dirigible builder, Mr. Anufriev was fascinated by flight ever since he was a boy, coming of age under Stalin and Khrushchev in the years after World War II. “In my paintings, I always wanted to combine earth and sky,” he told the Lynchburg News & Advance, a Virginia newspaper. “I never wanted to draw the horizon, separating them.”

After graduating from art school in Odessa, Mr. Anufriev painted what he described as “politically correct murals” glorifying Russian history and elevating the common worker. The pieces helped him avoid running afoul of Soviet officials, although he never joined the state artists’ union. In private, he associated with a group of antiestablishment painters, making expressionistic, luridly colored portraits that were exhibited in invitation-only apartment shows in the Ukrainian city.

Mr. Anufriev made hundreds of paintings of angels. (Alexander Anufriev)

Many of those early paintings were psychologically intense, reminiscent of portraits by Chaïm Soutine or Egon Schiele. But after he survived a 1966 earthquake that leveled a fifth of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Mr. Anufriev radically transformed his style, embracing a serene, pared-down aesthetic inspired by Byzantine religious icons as well as the work of Italian Renaissance masters like Piero della Francesca.

Mr. Anufriev had arrived in Tashkent after separating from his first wife, and he departed in the aftermath of tremors that left an estimated 300,000 people homeless and at least 15 dead. As he told it, he was rescued by a guardian angel, carried away from his bed just as the ceiling collapsed above his head. He awoke on the floor and headed back to Odessa, where a small quake struck just as he reached a friend’s home.

“He made a joke, saying, ‘Ah, Sasha has arrived, so there is an earthquake,’” Mr. Anufriev recalled in a 1996 interview with The Washington Post. “When I began painting again, the first images were messenger angels with long trumpets. The following year, I was working on a film crew in the western Ukraine, and every building we went into had lots of icons and angels. After the film was completed, I began painting angels more and more.”

Although his angels evoked centuries of Christian imagery, Mr. Anufriev said they were not tied to any single faith tradition. His spiritual subject matter placed him at odds with Soviet authorities, who campaigned against organized religion and placed him “under the watchful eye of the KGB,” as Mr. Anufriev put it. He was questioned and arrested several times before being granted an exit permit in 1980, following a protest he helped organize with four other artists and writers trying to leave the U.S.S.R.

“I war born in the Soviet Union naked,” he liked to say, “and I left the Soviet Union naked,” barred from taking any of his paintings with him.

After traveling by train to Austria and Italy, Mr. Anufriev reached the United States in 1981 and settled in Boston, where he exhibited at galleries and met Anisimova, a cellist and composer from Chechnya who was finishing a music doctorate at Yale University and hoping to study painting on the side.

“I arrived at his studio,” she said in a phone interview, “and never left.”

 After meeting cellist Tanya Anisimova, Mr. Anufriev incorporated cellos and other musical instruments into many of his paintings. (Alexander Anufriev)

The couple became collaborators, working together on interdisciplinary pieces combining her music with his artwork, which increasingly featured cellos and other musical instruments. In 1995, they moved to the Washington area, where Mr. Anufriev began showcasing his angel paintings at the Alla Rogers Gallery in Georgetown.

His pieces were by turns solemn and cheeky, filled with unexpected flourishes and art-history references: an angel towering above a naked man with a mustache, improbably riding a hobbyhorse; an angel enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette; a group of Botticelliesque cherubs, appearing to reference one of the Renaissance painters Mr. Anufriev so admired.

“Like them, Anufriev emphasizes clarity of perspective, pays careful attention to the way light falls within a picture and uses broad, radiant masses of color,” art critic Ferdinand Protzman wrote in The Post in 1996, praising the “lucid, meditative majesty” of Mr. Anufriev’s work.

During the Advent season that year, six of Mr. Anufriev’s monumental angel pieces — each measuring 10 feet by 15 feet — were exhibited at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill. Each followed a strict color scheme, corresponding with one of the six colors of the rainbow. Mr. Anufriev completed a new version of the series last year, this time painting the faces of angels in a cubist style like Picasso’s.

“We are all angels,” Mr. Anufriev observed. “But perhaps fallen ones.”

Mr. Anufriev in 2014 at his home studio. (Leonid Bendersky)
The younger of two children, Alexander Sergeyevich Anufriev was born in Moscow on Aug. 2, 1940. His father worked with Soviet aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan and later went into mining, taking a government job that brought the family to the Russian Far East, according to Anisimova. His mother was a former post-office worker who, according to family lore, was descended from Italian craftsmen who helped build the Kremlin.

“That’s why he felt an affinity with Italian Renaissance art,” Anisimova said.

Mr. Anufriev “was a free spirit,” she added, recalling how her husband avoided mandatory military service after high school in Moscow by pretending to be mentally ill and going to a psychiatric hospital, where he said he underwent electroshock therapy. Later, in Odessa, he learned to control his breathing and stand on his head while practicing yoga, which was not yet widespread.

His first three marriages, to Rita Shishatskaya, Olga Masienko and Faina Khotiner, ended in divorce. In addition to Anisimova, whom he married in 1999, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Odessa-based artist Sergei Anufriev; a daughter from his second marriage, Marina Anufrieva; a stepdaughter, Irina Aguirre; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Anufriev’s pieces are part of the permanent collections of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, as well as at institutions in the former Soviet Union.

Although he was never able to fly one of the dirigibles his father worked on, Mr. Anufriev told the News & Advance in 1995 that he had recently been able to fulfill a childhood dream.

“A friend of ours took us up in a plane in Massachusetts, and he let me work the controls,” he said. “I found that it came very naturally to me, but I also found that I no longer had the craving to do it.”

“I fly another way,” he added, gesturing toward his angel paintings.