Oddly, more than any other cultural artifact, it was a painting, a vivid canvas by Pablo Picasso housed in the Philadelphia Art Museum (PMA) that spurred me on to a life of writing.

The occasion for my fateful encounter with “The Three Musicians” (Philadelphia version—as we’ll discover, a decisive distinction) was my first visit home from college. I’d finally succeeded in being admitted to an out-of-town school, Brandeis, as a sophomore. The Museum was only a few steps away from where were we living in 1965. I wandered in on a splendid Fall Sunday, luminous ochre burnished by Dutch clouds. I’d already touched base with my family—on both its severed wings—exchanging updates, freely dispensing sophomoric wisdom. The Museum, like other of Philadelphia's major cultural resources, its Free Library, the Franklin Institute, and the Rodin Museum, had been neighborhood magnets since 1962, when, owing to a sequence of transpositions, my mother, sister, and I had migrated from the far northwest of the city, a neighborhood of post-War Air’n Light row homes, restful and dignified to this day, into the downtown urban hub.

Alas, I’m no longer able to reconstruct what drew me toward the Museum's substantial holdings in what we pigeonholed under the rubric “modern art” on that day, collections situated in the NE quadrant of the building's entrance-level floor. Barely launched in my vocation as a full-time student, my impulse perhaps stemmed from the very challenge posed by “modern art” to a skeptical U.S. public in 1965. This was, thanks to growing notoriety on the part of Matisse, Duchamp, Miró, Giacometti, Mondrian, and Pollock, along with Picasso, sudden immersion in a Brave New World: alien, outrageous, to be sure, but by dint of the art's sheer substance, undeniably formidable. Any broad espousal of this radical experimentation on the part of the U.S. public as of this juncture was held safely in check by deep-wired national wariness toward shell games and snake oil.