“My aim is to show the visible as possibility in a state of perpetual becoming.” – Yaacov Agam
How did it happen that a boy born in 1928 in the small town of Rishon Lezion, one of 11 siblings in a household of a rabbi, Yehoshua Gibstein, became the pioneer and leading exponent of kinetic art and op art, an acclaimed artist and sculptor best known for his multidimensional paintings and sculptures, and one of the most successful Israeli artists in the world?
Was it just because of a book Yaacov Agam came across at age 12, Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, which tells the story of Vincent van Gogh, and triggered his interest in art? Was it his unique imagination and talent? Was it due to the right teachers and the right decisions the artist made in his life? Or was it the combination of all these factors that led him to success?
Much has been written about Yaacov Agam (born Gibstein), but what is paramount is that his art continues to inspire and provoke questions. A visit to the Yaacov Agam Museum of Art (YAMA) in Rishon Lezion provides answers to many of them. The renewed museum, which just opened in late January, proves that Agam’s art commands continual rediscovery.
A visit to the Yaacov Agam Museum of Art
YAMA is now divided into three exhibition sections: the two newly added exhibitions, “Yaacov Agam: The Thread of Life” and the temporary “Yaacov Agam and Uri Tzaig: Surfaces in Motion,” and the permanent collection in its recalibrated form. It displays key art from all the periods of Agam’s life, including Pictorial Orchestration, his first “polyphonic” painting.
The 96-year-old Agam, who after spending most of his life in France has officially moved back to Israel in the last few years (settling in Tel Aviv), honored the opening of the new exhibitions at YAMA with his presence (and played the flute for the guests, as he used to in the past).
The museum itself, not just the new exhibitions, is worth a visit and a detailed exploration. It is inspired by kinetic art principles, which have been the artist’s primary focus, and relates to the fourth dimension, specifically the concept of time and constant movement.
Visitors enter the museum through its outside garden, walking between colorful columns Agam built especially for YAMA. Evocative of the spiraling well of New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, the interior gives viewers a touch of Agam’s famous 1980 exhibition experience (with a documentary on that exhibition featured on the premises).
“Yaakov Agam: The Thread of Life” shows the artist’s life story unfolded on the 36-meter-long wall: from his birth in 1928 to the opening of the Agam Museum in 2018 and his induction as a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2022.
A walk beside the wall with an overview of the permanent exhibition takes visitors through the crucial moments in Agam’s life and the peak moments of his artistic career, through photographs and smaller-scale works, including The Thread of Life, a 1967 work created by Agam in plexiglass and colored thread. Unlike his well-known large-scale sculptures, this work is just centimeters in size but equally interesting and innovative in its day.
This precisely designed exhibition helps us understand Agam’s journey from a small town, a religious home, and his early education in a heder (boys’ religious school), through his higher education at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, and the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where he moved in 1949, his move to Paris in 1951, and the consolidation of his position as an artist of international renown.
Agam’s polymorphic sculptures – the expression of his attention to time and constant movement, and his love for vivid colors and abstract forms – feel very universal. And perhaps that is what made him so well understood in Europe, the United States, and Asia. But also, what the museum is trying to remind us of is the very personal way Agam relates to his childhood in Rishon Lezion (in Mandatory Palestine, the future State of Israel) and his Jewish identity. “His source of inspiration was the sand of dunes and the Bible,” Ruth Makbi, the museum director, told the Magazine.
It is worth noticing that despite living most of his life abroad, Agam has always considered Israel his home, and we can surmise that his mother tongue, Hebrew, was the language that led him through his artistic life. He once noticed that the Hebrew words omanut (“art”) and emuna (“faith”) stem from the same root. His art bonds these two worlds in a unique way.
Through his sculptures, he encourages people to reflect on artistic creation, as the images change depending on the perspective; and through his transformative art, he encourages them to reflect on the spiritual values of society.
His constant need to demonstrate the concept of “becoming” (in contrast to “being”), of showing the dynamics of nature, the change, has deep roots in the Kabbalistic atmosphere in which he grew up. Yaniv Shapira, the curator of the current exhibitions, said that’s what made Agam stand out and be different when he first went to Paris in the early 1950s. Shapira pointed out that shortly after World War II, all the important artists were returning to Paris, making the city the world capital of art again, and “Agam was in the right place, at the right time, at the right age.”
At 25, Agam had his first solo exhibition, “Paintings in Motion,” in Paris in 1953. Two years later, in 1955, his work was presented at the “Movement” group exhibition, alongside such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder, Victor Vasarely, and Jesus Rafael Soto. Agam’s talent and uniqueness were immediately noticed. At this early stage of his life, he became one of the most influential modern artists.
In 1980, he had his solo exhibition titled “Agam: Beyond the Visible” at the Guggenheim Museum. Thomas Messer, the museum’s director, wrote then: “For Agam, true reality hides beneath appearances... it is complete and unified from a divine perspective, yet appears volatile and fragmented to human eyes. Its fragments reveal themselves simultaneously..., harmonic and contrapuntal. Reality is not tangible... it is more like kinetic energy in constant motion.”
AGAM’S WORKS are collected worldwide, and he has had solo exhibitions and has participated in major museum exhibitions almost everywhere. His monumental works are part of not just the world and Israeli art scenes but also their landscapes. However, as Shapira said, the artist is not appreciated to an equal degree in Israel as he is abroad.
“There is a very big dissonance between the way Agam was accepted and shown as an artist worldwide and the way it was here in Israel. I aimed to bring him home; to introduce him again to the local audience by focusing on his art from the beginning until now,” Shapira explained.
The Agam Museum takes the viewers through the respective chapters of Agam’s work, tells the story of his life through his art, and gives the visitors a chance to reacquaint themselves with the place of the artist in the history of Western art and his presence in Israeli art.
Agam continues to inspire many artists. An example of this is given in “Yaacov Agam and Uri Tzaig: Surfaces in Motion.” This show provides a notable example of an inspirational dialogue in art.
Shapira told the Magazine about the origins of this exhibition: “It was conceived while working on the permanent exhibition at the Yaacov Agam Museum and is a continuation and expansion of that display. It suggests that engaging with various exhibition methods and works in different media by other artists offers new insights into Agam’s work.
This idea manifests in ‘Surfaces in Motion,’ where Agam’s prints are shown alongside Tzaig’s carpets, indicating a dialogue between abstract form, modes of motion in space, and shifting viewpoints, transforming the viewer into an active participant in the exhibition experience.”
Referring to Agam’s prints, Shapira explained: “Agam developed his first screen prints in collaboration with master printers in France during the early 1960s. Though his paintings and sculptures commanded the spotlight, the understated medium of print on paper offered him other options for exploring the interplay between two and three dimensions and manifesting his concept of the ‘fourth dimension.’”
He added: “The aspect of change and the illusion of movement are created by the arrangement of forms – primarily a square, triangle, and circle – and by using color rulers consisting of warm and cool colors: black and white and varying color combinations. He [Agam] sometimes deliberately introduces imbalance between prints to heighten [that effect].”
A visit to the Agam Museum is a total experience. Each time, a walk through the colorful world of Agam, among his imaginative abstract sculptures, especially in the dark times we live in, is simply relaxing (even if this may not have been the artist’s underlying intention).
Agam, who also taught art, has often underscored how crucial “seeing” is in children’s education. In 1996, UNESCO awarded him the Jan Amos Comenius Medal for the “Agam Method” applied in the nonverbal visual education of young children.
For both children and adults, it is worth engaging with Agam’s art by visiting the Yaacov Agam Museum in Rishon Lezion, by examining the facade of the Dan Tel Aviv Hotel (or Rainbow Hotel, as many locals call it), or the world’s largest hanukkiah – the 32-foot-high, 4,000-pound gilded steel menorah Agam created and placed on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, or by recalling the iconic, however controversial Fire and Water Fountain in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, which was one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks between 1986 and 2016.
All of the above prove that the impossible is possible, that a Jewish boy from a small town in the Middle East can become an icon of the global art world.
Agam’s polymorphic, abstract, dynamic, and colorful sculptures not only fill viewers with joy but also tell a fascinating story, or many stories.