Israeli kinetic art pioneer Yaacov Agam dies at 98

Yaacov Agam, the best-known Israeli artist in the world, died today at age 98. Over more than six decades, he built an unusually influential career in Europe and the United States, becoming the only Israeli artist whose work was a decisive chapter in 20th-century art history. Only last year, at 97, he received the Israel Prize, a late state recognition of his international achievements.

Born in 1928 in Rishon Lezion to a large religious family, Agam became a leading pioneer of kinetic art, a postwar movement that fused movement, change and time into the artwork itself. He challenged static art and sought to create works that changed before the viewer, in what he called a “becoming present.” He studied at Bezalel in Jerusalem in 1948 and later in Europe with Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten.

Agam spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he joined the postwar international art scene. His breakthrough came with a solo exhibition in 1953, after which his works entered major museums and collections including MoMA in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou. His 1974 “Salon Agam” became one of the Pompidou’s best-known permanent works. From the 1970s onward he also made reliefs, prints and architectural environments, developed the “Agamograph,” and incorporated Jewish and Zionist motifs, later adding figurative images of leaders such as Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion.

His public commissions ranged from the Élysée Palace and the White House to sites in New York, Miami and Tokyo. In Israel, he is especially associated with the “Fire and Water” fountain at Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, which remains an empty gray concrete monument after a dispute over restoring its colored panels. In 2018, the Yaacov Agam Museum opened in his hometown and was originally designed to include living quarters for him. His death closes one of the most exceptional chapters in Israeli art.