Short autobiography and views of art by Russian-Armenian artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan. Courtesy Rusartnet

Picasso

My first encounter with modern art came in the third grade, in 1971, when my eyes fell on an issue of the UNESCO Courierthat was entirely devoted to a sociological survey and called “Public Opinion and Modern Art.” The magazine consisted of many pictures illustrating social preferences, starting with Renoir and Degas and ending with Dubuffet and Picasso. What I saw shocked me terribly. More than anything else I was surprised by a Klee painting, which depicted two arrows pointing at each other against a striped background. It was titled Evening Separation. I laughed mockingly. I took that magazine outside, to school, to show my friends what idiots there were in the world. But even then the faces painted by Picasso and Dubuffet stuck firmly in my head. And when I went to art school, the first thing I did was find that issue in a stack of magazines....