Aleksandr Anufriev

Aleksandr Anufriev lived and worked in the United States for the last half of his life, but during the Soviet era he was a nonconformist artist and an organizer of and active participant in the Odesa apartment exhibitions. His primary mediums were oil painting and pencil drawing, although he sometimes made lithograph prints and sculpture. His Soviet-era works aligned with spiritualism and mysticism, which were not in line with the Soviet art canon. Beginning in 1959 he was under close surveillance by the KGB due to his active participation in unofficial artistic activities. In September and October 1980, Anufriev, together with the Russian artists Vitaliy Sazonov (1947–1986) and Mikhail Chernyshov (b. 1945), organized demonstrations against the refusal of their exit visas at Moscow’s Department of Visas and Registration. After the second protest, all three were detained but released shortly afterward. They eventually escaped the Soviet Union the same year, thanks in no small part to the attention of the international media.

According to friends and colleagues, Anufriev and his childhood friend and fellow artist Volodymyr Strelnikov (b. 1939) are regarded as the heart and the brain, respectively, of the Odesa nonconformist art scene of the 1960s. Both entered the Odesa Art School in 1959, only to soon drop out after becoming disillusioned with the school’s conservatism and dogmatism. Two years earlier, Anufriev had attended the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow and had brought back with him to Odesa new ideas that fueled his search for alternatives to the language of socialist realism. He experimented with a variety of styles, at times so obsessed that he earned the playful nickname PicaSasha, a blend of his name with that of Pablo Picasso’s. His early works reveal the influence of the postimpressionists, like André Derain, as well as cubists such as Fernand Léger. He experimented a lot with his palette, sometimes even injecting black, which was under an unspoken ban among nonconformist artists. As for subject matter, initially there were many portraits of family and friends, sometimes still lifes.

Starting in 1964, Anufriev participated in apartment exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad. He visited the Russian cities often, becoming a mediator between the art circles there and those in Odesa. In comparison with artists in Moscow or Kyiv, the group known as the Odesa nonconformists, [1] also known as the second Odesa avant-garde, was distinguished by its apoliticality, focus on aesthetic searches, and complete detachment from the state-run Union of Artists. The number of members varied from five to fifteen over the years, with the core consisting of Anufriev, Strelnikov, Viktor Marinyuk (1939–2025), Valery Basanets (b. 1941), Liudmyla Yastreb (1945–1980), and Valentyn Khrushch (1943–2005). According to Anufriev, this community of artists managed to create a bond despite their contrasting opinions, which allowed them to develop creatively, discuss and exchange ideas, and survive, even in the more provincial landscape of Odesa. [2]

The model for many of Anufriev’s paintings was his then-wife, artist and later Odesa State Academy of Construction and Architecture professor Margarita Zharkova. She is depicted in, for instance, Portrait of Wife (c. 1963, ZAM, 2013.006.001), which presents a young woman in profile against the backdrop of an open window. The use of color and form is deliberately laconic, contributing to the creation of a dynamic and expressive image. The couple met in Moscow and then moved to Odesa, where they opened their room in the communal apartment on the corner of Uspenskaya and Osipova Streets for friends’ gatherings and exhibitions. As early as 1961, they hosted musical evenings, poetry meet-ups, and, most importantly, exhibitions and lotteries where guests could win one of the artist’s works. Part of the proceeds from these lotteries was given to the artists, while the remainder was retained by the event organizers, a practice that helped improve Anufriev and Zharkova’s otherwise modest financial situation. The KGB regularly searched the apartment, and the guests were under surveillance.

In search of better earnings, the family of three (their son, Sergey Anufriev, a famous conceptual artist, was born in 1964) briefly moved to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where they almost died in the 1966 earthquake. It was there, according to Anufriev, that he saw an angel who protected him with her wing. Finally, his long-lasting experiments with genres and styles, his pursuit of harmony between the mundane and the sacred, found their channel in the figure of this angel.

Renaissance artists, particularly Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico, and Byzantine icons were among Anufriev’s inspirations in this artistic choice. Before landing on this figure, he sought to express the limpid beauty, meditative majesty, and inherent good of the world through his paintings but refused to call them icons for fear of espousing any particular religion. Stylistically his new paintings were consonant with medieval sacred paintings: flat figures placed on a homogeneous background, without details and with a clear perspective. With these works Anufriev aimed to reach beyond the visible world and to reveal the divine substance of every object. As for his palette, he used almost exclusively pastel shades, typical of Odesa nonconformists, with bright splashes of red or blue.

Anufriev lived in the United States for more than forty years, until his death in 2024. He maintained friendly relations with some members of the Odesa group but never visited Ukraine. He refused to learn English, perhaps satisfied enough by the sublime practice of painting, and his style did not change significantly. The only noticeable change was that his angels more often carried violins or cellos, likely a tribute to Tanya Anisimova, a cellist and his wife in the last years of his life.  

Kateryna Filyuk

Notes:

1. The group named itself after the Liudmyla Yastreb painting Non (1979, Dymchuk Collection).

2. Alfia Akhmerova, “Under Secret Surveillance: Sketches of the Unofficial Artistic Life of Odesa in the 60s and 70s,” parts 1–4, South, nos. 6, 9, 14, 16 (1993).