Yaacov Agam

Biography

In 1946 the eighteen-year-old Yaacov Gibstein was arrested by the British authorities in the mass roundups known in Palestine as Black Sabbath, and he spent several months in the Latrun detention camp. Three years later he left to study in Zurich.

He was born on 11 May 1928 in Rishon LeZion, in Mandatory Palestine, to Yehoshua Gibstein, a rabbi and kabbalist, and Kendel Yokheved, née Powembrowski. Both parents came from the Polish town of Augustów. As a child he attended heder, often skipped school and spent long hours alone among the dunes, watching the wind change their shapes; later he linked his interest in changeable forms to this. His father encouraged his drawing. His older brother Hanania later became mayor of Rishon LeZion. In 1946–1948 Agam studied at the Bezalel school in Jerusalem under Mordecai Ardon, who had himself passed through the Bauhaus. In 1949, at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, his teacher was Johannes Itten, and the ideas of Max Bill on aesthetics and mathematics were close at hand. In Zurich he earned his living in advertising agencies. The architectural historian Sigfried Giedion advised him to continue his studies in Chicago, and in November 1951, on his way to America, Agam stopped in Paris and stayed, without knowing French. At first he lived very poorly, ate at the Salvation Army and gathered materials for his works from rubbish bins, then found a job teaching drawing at a Jewish school. Enrolment in the Atelier d’art abstrait gave him a student residence permit.

In 1953 his first solo exhibition, “Tableaux transformables”, was held at the Galerie Craven; it was then that he took the surname Agam. His notched-surface reliefs changed as the viewer moved along them. In 1955 he showed work in “Le Mouvement” at Denise René’s gallery, alongside Tinguely, Soto, Vasarely and Bury. André Breton devised titles for some of his pieces, among them “Dibbuk”.

In 1964 he exhibited at documenta III in Kassel, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his “Double Metamorphosis II”. In 1965 he took part in “The Responsive Eye” at MoMA in New York. Critics observed that the device of alternating images on a notched ground was not new. At about the same time he made “Jacob’s Ladder” for the Jerusalem Convention Center, a frieze 59 metres long. In 1969–1970 he created, for a cultural centre in Leverkusen, a wall composition of six hundred aluminium plates that is viewed by walking around the hall in a circle. Soto, the story goes, could not speak for two hours after seeing it.

From 1966 Agam made sculptures from repeated geometric segments that move around an axis; from 1971 he moved to monumental scale: “Eighteen Levels” and “A Thousand Doors” in Jerusalem, and works in France under the “one per cent” scheme for art in public building projects. At the same time came experiments that are hard to call painting: sound and tactile pictures, remote-controlled light installations, and a project for a multi-stage theatre (1962), for which Jean-Marie Serreau that same year built a hall with four stages around a central floor. For Eugène Ionesco he designed in 1980 a production at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the author and the artist quarrelled over the terms of later performances.

In 1972 Georges Pompidou commissioned from him an antechamber for the private apartments in the Élysée Palace. The work went on for years; Pompidou died in April 1974 while it was unfinished, and the “Salon Agam” later ended up in the Centre Pompidou. The carpet for it, in 180 colours, was woven at the Gobelins manufactory over more than two years.

The fountain at La Défense in Paris opened in 1978: 66 jets, a basin faced with Venetian glass mosaic in 86 shades, and a cascade 70 metres long. “Fire and Water” in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv opened in 1986 after ten years of work; in 2016 the fountain was removed during a temporary rearrangement of the square, and the kinetic mechanism was not put back. Retrospectives of Agam’s work were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris (1972), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1973) and the Guggenheim Museum (1980). He devised “Agamographs”, prints whose images change when seen from different angles, designed the winner’s trophy for the 1999 Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem, and a huge Hanukkah menorah for Fifth Avenue in New York. In 1996 UNESCO awarded him the Jan Amos Comenius Medal for the “Agam Method” of visual education for young children. A museum bearing his name opened in Rishon LeZion in 2018.

In 2026 Agam was awarded the Israel Prize for Visual Arts. He died on 21 June 2026, at the age of 98.