Leonid Afremov (1955-2019) was a Belarusian-born painter who worked in Israel, Florida and Mexico and became one of the best-known names in online art.
He painted rainy streets and night lights with a palette knife and sold them straight to buyers online after galleries kept most of the money. His cityscapes are now everywhere, and some canvases sold under his name are recreations by artists he trained.
Born in Vitebsk, the town of Marc Chagall, he was kept out of official exhibitions because he was Jewish, and he ended his life selling from a studio on the Caribbean coast.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In Israel, galleries bought his paintings for about 50 shekels, roughly 15 dollars, and resold them for 500 to 5,000. He later recalled being told that, as a Russian immigrant, he had no choice. So he went around the galleries and sold to buyers himself.
It worked beyond anything a dealer had offered him. Paintings listed on eBay sold for hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, and the family later ran its own website, still the main place his work is sold.
Then, in 2011, he did something most of his buyers never noticed. He began training other painters to make recreations of his pictures in his style. The family's website now sells those hand-painted copies under the Afremov name. So the question his fame raises is not whether he was real. It is which of the Afremovs on a wall he actually painted.
What You'll Discover
What a Soviet painter was allowed to sell.
What the galleries paid him per painting.
Where the family ended up before eBay.
What the knife does that brushes cannot.
Who else paints in his name.