This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Yaacov Agam was born Yaacov Gipstein in Rishon le Zion, in Israel on
May 11, 1928. His father was a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar and a
Kabbalist. The family was poor, and the young Agam received
little regular schooling; he studied under a "melamed" in the local
synagogue. He soon realized he could draw.
"I used to come
home with drawings, at first afraid of my father's reactions, since
drawing was not permitted on religious principles. But on one occasion
my father told me a story: that when he was a student at a yeshiva, he
made a drawing on a handkerchief and forgot it on his desk. He came
back to look for it because he thought the rabbi would punish him for
drawing a figure. But later, when he had forgotten the whole matter and
was visiting the rabbi's home, he found the drawing hanging upon the
wall."
As a teenager, Agam entered the New Bezalel School of
Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, where he studied with its director,
Mordecai Ardon. There they discovered his "astonishing capacity
for drawing. But that's a waste of time, mere craftsmanship, compared
to the direct spiritual approach" that his early exposure to Talmudic
and Kabbalistic study had taught him.
In 1949, he journeyed to
Zurich to study. He traveled throughout Europe, where he filled
notebook upon notebook with drawings and sketches of Western art and
architecture. In viewing the art of the past, he became obsessed
with the idea of inventing a new artistic mode of expression that would
reflect the present. In 1951, he settled in a studio in Paris where he
discovered the world of galleries and dealers, of bohemian cafes and
intellectuals and artists. Then he himself was discovered.
He received his first one-man show, the first recorded one-man show of
kinetic art, in 1953.
One of the artistic phenomena of post
World War II Europe, he is a leader in the world of experimental
art. Agam's works are found in virtually every major museum. His
commissions adorn buildings, monuments and vistas from the headquarters
of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France to the unique Agam
Room in the Louvre in Paris, as well as Hadassah Hospital at Ein Karem
in Jerusalem and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. The
French, German and Israeli governments have commissioned him.
Agam
is one of the best-known artists Israel has produced. His work
can be divided into three categories: contrapuntal paintings that
change color and form as the viewer moves; transformable objects that
contain elements whose patterns can be altered by the viewer; and
tactile constructions that vibrate, move or give off sound when
touched. Agam will use a palette of up to 180 colors for any
given painting--so many hues that few photographs can reproduce the
fine gradations in shade.
While many critics have declared Agam
a major contemporary artist and esthetic theoretician, other critics
have just as loudly denounced him as being a cold technician, a pale
imitator of the Mondrian of the 1940s, a pretentious idealogue.
Scientists are as well equipped to judge his work as are art
critics. They say, and at the same time assert that his
"research" has led him only to rediscover visual tricks that have been
known since the Renaissance.
The ability to enrage is often as
vital a talent as the gift to engage and delight, however. Only
skeptics resist the magician and perhaps that is why Agam insists that
his visual sleights of hand are for children of all ages. Standing
before the shifting, glittering surface of a work by Agam, it is
difficult not to experience the childlike surprise of discovery, and
perhaps that is the Kabbalistic secret of his success.
Written and submitted August 2004 by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources:
Diane Cole in The National Jewish Monthly, April 1977
Time Magazine
Hadassah Magazine
Contemporary Artists, 2nd Edition
| |
Biography from Rogallery.com:
|  Yaacov Agam is one of the pioneer creators of the kinetic movement in
art as well as its most outstanding contemporary representative.
Agam was born in 1928 a son of a Rabbi of Rishon LeZion (Israel), who
devoted his life to the study of Jewish religious matters and wrote
books. Agam considers himself somehow as a visual continuation of
his father's quest for spirituality.
He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, and in
Switzerland at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule and the Zurich
University. After arriving to Paris in 1951, Agam held his first
one man exhibition with a great success in 1953 This exhibition
consisted totally of kinetic, movable and transformable paintings,
which actually was the first one-man show in art history exclusively
devoted to kinetic art.
A passionate experimenter, Agam deals
with such problems as the 4th dimension, simultaneity and time in the
visual, plastic arts, and has extended his experiments to application
in the fields of literature, music and art theory.
His works
express a concept that breaks away with the established way of
expressing reality in limited, static way. In his works, he strives to
demonstrate the principle of reality as a continuous "becoming" rather
than static "graven image." His paintings Double Metamorphosis 11 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Transparent Rhythms 11
in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C. give the best example of his
polymorphic painting. His works are placed in many public places
including Communication x 9 on the Michigan Avenue in Chicago (1983), Communication: Night and Day at the AT&T building in New York (1974), Super Lines Volumes at the Pare Floral in Paris (1971), and his murals Peace and Life arc installed at the Parliament of Europe in Strasbourg (1977).
Agam has expressed the new concepts in monumental works as in his Jacob's Ladder,
which forms the ceiling of the National Convention House in
Jerusalem. He created a "floating museum", including all the
artworks for public areas and cabins, for the Carnival Cruise Line's
luxury cruise ship "Celebration" (1987). His fire-water fountain
in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv (1986) streams water, fire, and music
-elements of flux and life which cannot be static - as its colored
elements rotate in this multidimensional monumental work.
For
the Elysee Palace in Paris, with the request of President Georges
Pompidou Agam created in 1972 a whole environmental of the Salon with
the walls covered with polymorphic murals of changing images a kinetic
ceiling, moving transparent colored doors and a kinetic carpet on which
he placed a sculpture. It embraces viewers: they are no longer looking
at a framed, fixed scene, but rather arc moving within an artistic
space which changes constantly according to their shifting position and
point of view. Similar attempt was made for the concert hall, Forum
Leverkusen in Germany in 1970.
Agam created many environmental sculptures, including Hundred Gates in the garden of the residence of the President of Israel in Jerusalem, 3 x 3 Interplay installed at the Julliard School of Music at the Lincoln Center and Wings of the Heart at J. F. Kennedy airport in New York. In 1984, he made a sculpture Beating Heart
for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. In 1988, he created a
transparent torah ark for the Hebrew Union College in New York, and
monumental multidimensional sculpture at the Crystal Palace Hotel in
Nassau, Bahamas.
In 1987, he created a memorial at the Wailing
Wall in Jerusalem for the victims of the holocaust. In 1991 he
created a sculpture, Tree of Life, and a room for meditation at
the Haidrah Yeshiva at the Wailing Wall Plaza in Jerusalem. He
also made 14 stained glass windows for the Holocaust study center of
Emunah Women of America building in Jerusalem.
In the new
district of La Defense in Paris, Agam created a monumental musical
fountain (1977), with its pool made of polymorphic mosaic surface. It
is comprised of 66 vertical water jets shooting water up to 14 meters;
the fountain was further enhanced with the addition of five new triple
tulip jets in 1991. Another fire-water fountain was inaugurated
in 1991 at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida. Other monumental
works, include the painting of the entire building facade of Mondrian
Hotel in Los Angeles (1984) and 36-poor Villa Regina building in
Florida (1983). He made a large mural for Port Authority Bus Terminal
in New York, commission gained through an international competition, in
1984.
His kinetic sculpture Star of Peace was presented
as the Ben-Gurion Award for an Outstanding Contribution to
Understanding Between the Peoples of the Middle East to President Anwar
Sadat, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Agam
has delivered lectures concerning his theories and experiments at many
art schools, conventions, universities and museums, and during the year
of 1968 he was a guest-lecturer at Harvard University, where he
conducted a seminar and course "Advanced Exploration in Visual
Communication", International recognition has been widespread: Prize
for Artistic Research at the Sao Paolo Biennale (1963), Chevalier de
l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1974), Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy,
Tel Aviv University (1975), Medal of the Council of Europe (1977),
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1985), Sandberg Prize from
the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1985), Palette d'Or at the International
Festival at Cagnes-surMer (1985), and most recently the Grand Prize at
the First International Biennale in Nagoya, Japan, ARTECH '89 (1989).
He
has participated in shows all over the world and has had many one-man
exhibitions, including the retrospective exhibition held at the Musee
National d'art Modeme in Paris (1972), which was then shown at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Stadtische Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, and
Tel Aviv Museum. Another large-scale retrospective exhibit was
held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1980). He had a large
one-man exhibition at the Museum ofPontoise (1975), the Palm Spring
Desert Museum, California, on an occasion of the inauguration of the
museum (1976), the Museum of Art Birmingham, Alabama (1976), the Museo
de Arte Modemo, Mexico (1976), the National Museum of Art, Cape Town,
South Africa (1977). The retrospective exhibition was held at the
lsetan Museum in Tokyo, Daimaru Museum in Osaka and Kawasaki City
Museum in Japan (1989), and at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in
Buenos Aires Argentina (1996). He also held an exhibition
"Selected Suites" at the Jewish Museum, New York (1975). Agam has also
had many one-man shows in art galleries since 1953, including Denise
Rene Gallery, Paris (1956), MarIborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
(1966), Gallery Denise Rene, New York (1971) and a series of one man
exhibits all over the United States at the Circle Fine Art Galleries.
His
visual education method and non-verbal educational system, meant to
increase the creative and intellectual abilities of the children by the
usage of visual alphabet as a mother tongue, is implemented in
pre-schools and kindergartens in Israel. In 1996, Agam was awarded the
Jan Amos Comenius Medal 1996 from the UNESCO "for having devised a
particularly effective method of visual teaching for children." |
Biography from American Design Ltd.:
| Born in 1928 a son of a Rabbi of Rishon LeZion (Israel), who devoted
his life to the study of Jewish religious matters and wrote
books. Agam considers himself somehow as a visual continuation of
his father's quest for spirituality.
Agam studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, and in
Switzerland at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule and the Zurich
University. After arriving to Paris in 1951, Agam held his first
one-man exhibition with a great success in 1953. This exhibition
consisted totally of kinetic, movable and transformable paintings,
which actually was the first one-man show in art history exclusively
devoted to kinetic art.
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