Gallery
In this gallery you can view approximately 1,000 paintings that have been selected by the estate’s four appraisers. Additionally, the paintings can be sorted into various categories.
Litvinovsky made a living by painting commissioned portraits. The rest of his thousands of paintings were created out of passion and enjoyment; painting was his entire life and his greatest love, one he did not wish to commercialize or tarnish through sales. In his eyes, selling paintings was a desecration, an act he likened to prostitution — that’s how he felt.
As a result, he sold very few of his works (other than commissioned portraits). Some were gifted to people he loved or wished to thank, while the rest simply piled up in his home. Once he finished a painting, he set it aside and immediately turned his attention to the next one. Because his focus was on creating art rather than managing the works he had already completed, he felt no need to sign or date them.
He also refrained from giving titles to his paintings. The reasoning for this was straightforward: Most of the paintings, to some extent, are abstract. As such, each viewer can see different things in them. Giving a painting a title directs the viewer’s imagination to see in it the content implied by the name. In contrast, Litvinovsky believed that the viewer should be free from external influences and see in the painting whatever their imagination leads them to.
Immediately after his death, his family recorded the paintings in his home. Only paintings were included in the documentation, not sketches, lithographs or prints. The documentation was made on the back side of each painting and included a unique number written by hand as well as the name "Litvinovsky" which was written by hand on the canvas paintings and by a stamp on the paper paintings