Yaacov Agam
Yaacov Agam, the artist, stands for the beginning of a new art. This is not to say that his works do not have aesthetic antecedents and points of reference in art history, or, that the artist creates in a vacuum, uninfluenced by art that preceded him and the contemporary art of his time, or, that similarities and comparisons cannot be drawn between Agam's works and those of other artists as diverse as Durer, Goya, de Vinci, Mondrian, Klee and Picasso.
Agam travels with fluidity among various artistic traditions and critical labels.The son of a rabbi, Agam can trace his ancestry back six generations to the founder of the Chabad movement in Judaism. Agam has been associated him with abstract artists, hard edge artists, and artists such as Josef Albers and Max Bill. Others find in Agam's work an indebtedness to the masters of the Bauhaus. Agam's approach to art, being conceptual in nature, has been likened to Duchamp's, who expressed the need to put art at the service of the spirit and, because of Agam's employment of motion in his art, he has been compared to Calder, the artist who put sculpture into motion. (Motion is not an end, but a means for Agam. Calder's mobiles are structures that are fixed, revolving at the whim of the wind. In a work by Agam, the viewer must intervene.) Agam has also been classified as an pop artist because he excels in playing with our visual sensitivities. Moreover, it is generally acknowledged that Agam is one of the founders of the post-war kinetic art movement, along with Pol Bury, Soto and Tinguely.
