The Aspiring Cult Leader’s Missing Art and the Nephew Obsessed With His Legacy

Boobis’s sudden death was an enormous blow to his family. Mr. Chanin, then an impressionable and admiring teenager, felt it profoundly, as if the life force of his universe had been extinguished.

“He was kind of like a god,” Mr. Chanin, 66, said recently. “We all kind of grew up thinking we were part of, like, the royal family or something. We just felt special.” This sense of exceptionalism, he explained, emanated from Boobis. “We felt like we came from this extraordinary background and had extraordinary genes, or whatever it was,” he said, “mostly by dint of my uncle Brad.”

The disappearance of the paintings only compounded this sense of loss for Mr. Chanin. It was a feeling that would calcify over time into an obsession.

Rise of the artist

Bradford Boobis was born in 1927 with the name Milton Boobis. He was the sixth of seven children of Pearl and Benjamin, a pair of immigrants from what is now Ukraine who moved to New York in the early 1900s. Benjamin, a jeweler, eventually went blind and, unable to do his work, died in 1960 after taking cyanide, Mr. Chanin said. At 3, Milton survived a bout with rheumatic fever but complications from the condition left him with an accelerated heartbeat. He grew up with a sense that time is fragile, the sand in his hourglass falling at a faster rate than that of most. “He knew he might die young,” his son, Barry, recalled.

Young Boobis spoke quickly and confidently, often in bold, declarative statements. While his siblings despised their last name and later pushed to legally change it, Barry said, Milton instead changed his first name. By the time he moved out of his parents’ house, at age 27, he would be Bradford Boobis.