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Friday July 11, 2008

At 80, Israeli artist still leading a colorful life

by gabriella burman
jta

It would be easy to characterize Yaacov Agam as a painter in the twilight of his career.

The celebrated Israeli artist, who turned 80 in May, is focused on preserving his legacy of great public works and building an eponymous museum in his birthplace, Rishon LeZion

“I don’t feel 80,” he says. “And anyway, 80 in the Talmud corresponds to strength.”

The dark moustache of his youth has given way to a long white beard, but the deeply spiritual Agam remains serious, sharp and agile. He is at work on a show to be unveiled in his adopted city of Paris in October.

Agam also has been jet-setting to birthday parties in his honor in Miami, Detroit and New York City, where the French and Israeli consulates recently held a joint event in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary and “80 years of Agam.”

He also aspires to win a Nobel Prize for an award-winning educational program he developed that strengthens visual skills and memory in preschool children. Many schools across Israel have implemented the Agam Smarts program.

“This will be my greatest contribution, as important as my artwork,” Agam said. “Because if we can learn a new way to see, we can unleash creativity, and creativity brings solutions to the world.”

His creations run counter to the time-bound nature of most artwork he saw as a young man.

Viewing a painting was like “looking at a gravestone,” he said. “It was in the past and never changing.”

The concept was at odds with the kabbalistic upbringing by his father, Rabbi Yehoshua Gibstein, the author of several books on Jewish spirituality.

Agam married a basic premise of Jewish mysticism — that one never stops transforming as long as one is alive — to kinetic art, a movement that incorporates motion into artistic expression.

Among Agam’s greatest works reflecting this aesthetic are the monumental fountain integrating sculpture, light and the musical orchestration of water jets in La Defense, Paris’ business district; the Dizengoff Plaza fountain of water, fire and music in Tel Aviv; and countless “Agamographs,” many of them containing Jewish subject matter, which present different images depending on the viewing angle.

The works all contain the colors of the rainbow, a universal image that Agam has called God’s first gift of art to man.

Not everyone agrees that Agam’s oeuvre will stand the test of time. Some critics contend that Agam has made a career of one idea and never evolved, while others call it a fertile concept that has sustained him for more than 60 years of making art.

“I think he’s a stone genius,” said Morris Shapiro, the gallery director at ParkWest Gallery in suburban Detroit.

“I’ve gained an appreciation of his religion through his art,” says collector Chris Cameron, a Christian. “There’s a lot more going on in the painting than what meets the eye initially.”

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