After graduating from art school in Odessa, Mr. Anufriev painted what he called “politically correct murals” that glorified Russian history and glorified the common worker. Although he never joined the state artists’ union, these pieces helped him avoid falling into conflict with the Soviet authorities. In his private life, he associated with a group of anti-establishment painters, creating expressionist, brightly colored portraits that were displayed at invitation-only exhibitions in the Ukrainian city.

Many of these early paintings were psychologically intense, reminiscent of portraits by Chaïm Soutine or Egon Schiele. But after surviving the 1966 earthquake that destroyed a fifth of Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, Mr. Anufriev radically changed his style, adopting a calm, simple aesthetic inspired by Byzantine religious icons as well as the work of Italian Renaissance masters. He stars as Piero della Francesca.

Mr. Anufriev came to Tashkent after separating from his first wife and left after the tremors left nearly 300,000 people homeless and at least 15 dead. According to his account, he was rescued by a guardian angel and carried away from his bed as the ceiling collapsed over his head. He woke up on the ground and returned to Odessa; While he was reaching a friend’s house here, a small earthquake occurred.

“He joked, ‘Oh, Sasha’s here, so there’s an earthquake,'” Mr. Anufriev recalled in a 1996 interview with The Washington Post. “When I started painting again, the first images were messenger angels with long trumpets. The following year I was working on a film crew in Western Ukraine and every building we entered there were so many icons and angels. “After the film was completed, I started painting more and more angels.”

Although his angels evoke centuries-old Christian images, Mr. Anufriev said they are not tied to any faith tradition. His spirituality put 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. Following a protest he helped organize with four other artists and writers seeking to leave the USSR, he was interrogated and arrested several times before being granted permission to leave in 1980.

“I was born naked in the Soviet Union during the war,” he was fond of saying, “and I left the Soviet Union naked,” although he was forbidden to take 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; Here he opened exhibitions in galleries and met Anisimova, a Chechen cellist and composer who was about to finish her doctorate in music at Yale University. On the other hand, I am studying painting.

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

The pair became collaborators, working together on interdisciplinary pieces that combine his music with artworks in which the cello and other musical instruments increasingly feature. They moved to the Washington area in 1995.

His works were by turns serious and brash, full of unexpected flourishes and art historical references: an angel towering over a moustachioed naked man, improbably riding a hobby horse; an angel enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette; A group of Botticelliesque angels that appear to reference one of the Renaissance painters Mr. Anufriev admires.

“Like them, Anufriev emphasizes clarity of perspective, pays attention to how light falls on the painting, and uses large, luminous swaths of color,” art critic Ferdinand Protzman wrote in The Post in 1996, praising the painting’s “lucid, contemplative grandeur.” From the works of Mr. Anufriev.

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

“We are all angels,” Mr. Anufriev said. “But maybe the fallen ones.”

Alexander Sergeyevich Anufriev, the youngest of two children, was born in Moscow on August 2, 1940. His father worked with Soviet aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan and later moved into mining, taking a government job that brought the family to the Russian Far East. To Anisimova. His mother was a former post office worker and, according to family information, a descendant of Italian craftsmen who helped build the Kremlin.

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

She added that Mr. Anufriev “had a free spirit” and recalled her husband telling her how he had evaded compulsory military service after high school in Moscow by pretending to be mentally ill and going to a psychiatric hospital to receive electroshock therapy. Later, while doing yoga in Odessa, she learned to control her breathing and stand on her head.

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

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

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

“A friend of ours put us on a plane in Massachusetts and left me at the controls,” he said. “I realized that it came very naturally to me, but I also realized that I no longer had the desire to do it.”

“I’m flying the other way,” he added, pointing to the angel paintings.