Born in 1928 in Djadjur, Armenia, Minas Avetisyan was a painter and set designer. From 1952 to 1954, he studied at the Institute of Theater and Art in Yerevan, and from 1954 to 1960, at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He benefited from the advice of the Armenian painter Martiros Saryan, but developed a style of his own, with an intense use of color similar to that of Fauvism. The influence of Armenian medieval art is strongly apparent in his landscapes, self-portraits and scenes of peasant life. His work combines an uncommon and expressive richness of color with a dramatic monumentality of composition. In 1962, he had a one-man show in Yerevan, and another in Moscow in 1969. In 1972, a fire in his studio destroyed a large portion of his work. In 1974, he designed the sets for Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane at the A. Spendiarov Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in Yerevan. Following his death in a car accident in 1975, a museum devoted to Avetisyan was established in Djadjur.