Washington ? A friendship that lasted 19 years until the death of ballet star Rudolf Nureyev has produced a series of more than 35 portraits of him by James Wyeth.

They were being presented to the public Thursday at the Kennedy Center.

Artist James Browning Wyeth stands next to one of his portraits of dancer Rudolf Nureyev during the opening reception of the exhibit Capturing

There’s Nureyev in a fur coat; Nureyev in just a loin cloth; a ballet scene called “Nureyev Dead,” with two dancers mourning over the prostrate Nureyev. There’s also a painting of the star taking a bow in the spotlight, holding a rose that seems to have been tossed at him. There are also costumes and photos.

Wyeth explained in the catalog to the show that Nureyev didn’t wear a fur coat while dancing, but he painted him in one to recall the dancer’s Russian origin. Nureyev was born in a train near the city of Irkutsk. He died in Paris of AIDS in 1993.

The exhibit was planned to overlap with performances at the Kennedy Center later this month by the Kirov opera, orchestra and ballet of St. Petersburg. Nureyev had his first big success with the Kirov company. When it was on a European tour in 1963, he made a leap over an airport railing to ask asylum of French authorities rather than return to the Soviet Union.

Wyeth, 55, is the son of 84-year-old painter Andrew Wyeth, whose “Christina’s World” is one of the most-often reproduced of American paintings. A show of the elder Wyeth’s most recent works opened Friday in Jackson, Miss. His son last year did a painting of the White House ordered by former President Clinton in honor of its 200th anniversary.

Nureyev and the younger Wyeth first met in 1974, but it took three years before he would consent to pose. Wyeth continued to work on some of the paintings until 2001.

“What attracted me was Nureyev’s physicality, that peasant force,” Wyeth once told an interviewer. “He is very aware of his animal nature he has this marvelous energy, and he is always moving, always on stage. He is as strange off the dance stage as on.”

At a reception Wednesday to celebrate the opening of the exhibit, President Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center spoke of hopes for a whole museum devoted to the performing arts. Exhibition space at the center itself is small. Planning for the museum calls for it to be built on a new structure that would span the motorways separating the Kennedy Center from downtown Washington.

“We hope to have a bill written in Congress within a month to authorize it,” he said in an interview.

Government money that would be a basis for collecting funds from private donors could be sought in next year’s federal budget, he said.

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