A Hands-On Visit Leads to a Promise : * Arts: The founder of a Soviet children’s museum offers to bring ‘our five best art teachers here, to teach your children.’

Over the gleeful screams of scores of excited elementary school kids exploring the hands-on exhibits at the Los Angeles Children’s Museum, director James G. Leaf tells a visiting Soviet dignitary about his $3-million expansion project. In that grandiose vision, the downtown museum would become an 80,000-square-foot facility surrounded by a five-acre children’s plaza complete with a 500-seat theater and other performance areas.

The visitor--a deputy member of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet governmental body and a personal friend of Mikhail Gorbachev--is more than just a bureaucrat. He is a noted art critic and the founder and director of both the Armenian Museum of Modern Art and the Children’s Museum of Armenia. And as Leaf put it during their hour-and-a-half meeting last week, he was “at the foot of the master” and seeking advice for his L.A. institution.

He got it.

“The goal should be not just to entertain, but to learn something too,” said Henrik S. Igitian, whose children’s museum was one of the world’s first when he opened it 20 years ago. “In America, you don’t really have museums for children, what you have is more like Las Vegas shows for children, that only entertain . . . and don’t take art seriously. There is no professionalism.”

But after his opening criticism, spoken through a translator, the gracious and dignified guest offered a solution: “I would like to sign a contract, to bring our five best art teachers here, to teach your children.”

The offer came out of the blue. It was one of the few subjects addressed at length by Igitian, whose museum exhibits artworks produced by children from all over the world.

What he was proposing--in an offer which Leaf said he would consider after consultation with the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and an investigation into possible funding--was to bring “serious, professional” art training to Los Angeles children in disciplines including graphic art, sculpture and painting. It would be modeled after the Armenian museum’s own Aesthetic Education Centers, which now number 15 and employ 600 arts professionals to instruct more than 5,000 children as young as 4 years old on painting, needlework, ceramics, embroidery, woodcarving, instrumental music, jazz and other art forms.

Igitian’s visit was organized by Elizabeth Agbabian of the Armenian General Benevolent Union as a follow-up to last fall’s show of children’s paintings shown here, which featured works by survivors of the 1988 earthquake that devastated the Soviet republic.

City and arts officials said the visit is significant for Los Angeles’ cultural future because it represents “a prelude” to a host of similar U.S.-Soviet cultural exchanges now in the planning stages.

Artistic exchanges, Igitian said, are especially important to Soviet arts programs today, because of the country’s changing attitudes toward private ownership and government subsidies for the arts.

“Today, we are still state owned and funded,” Igitian said of his institution, “but I’m afraid that that might change and then we would have to raise our own funds. We have much to learn from (Americans art institutions) about financial (matters).”