A friend visiting New York, knowing of my fascination with Mark Rothko, texted me a picture of one of his paintings (in MOMA or someplace?).

This led to a conversation with my wife, Lissa, who reminded me that she and I, years before we knew one another, had both been to see the 1979 retrospective of Rothko’s work at the LA County Museum of Art.

It’s a fun game for us, remembering the shows we’d both been to see in those years, disentangling the memories of things we saw separately, and those we saw together once we met. Lissa was a young artist living that life in L.A. I was the son of an artist – Dad took me to see all the most interesting shows. It was a way of life for both of us.

My sister, Lisa, joins in the game sometimes. She was around both before and after Lissa and I met, and art.

Lisa wasn’t around for the Rothko show, but we all three for sure saw the Art and Technology show at the LA County in 1971. There were lasers and bubbling mud pots and Claes Oldenburg’s giant undulating ice bag. Dad took teenage John and sister Lisa. My future wife, Lissa, who I wouldn’t meet for another dozen years, went as a young art school student.

In 1986 – by that time Lissa and I were married, and my wife and my sister, Lisa, were converging on their own deep, lifelong friendship – the three of us were back at LACMA together to see what remains one of the most significant art exhibits I have ever seen. It was a collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings from the Hermitage in then-Soviet Russia. It was a magnificent unfolding, in a single time and place, of the birth of the modern.

There was this through line you could see, standing before these magnificent canvases, all compressed into a single show, one after the other, from the Impressionists to Matisse to this ragged Picasso, Three Women, one of the companion pieces to Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. There was Lissa, the young love of my life, leading me through it, talking about what she saw. I’d lived around cubism my whole life – some of my earliest art memories are Dad’s cubist landscapes from the ‘50s – but I’d never really thought through what the birth of the modern meant.

I’ve written before about how Lissa taught me to see. The Hermitage show is one of the places where that happened.