Agam is one of the pioneer creators of the kinetic movement in art as well as its most outstanding contemporary representative. Born in 1928, son of an orthodox Rabbi of Rishon Letzion (Israel), Yaacov Agam studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. His teacher was Mordecai Ardon, a former student at the Bauhaus in Weimar. On 1949, Ardon advises Agam to study in Zurich and commends him to Johannes Itten. In Zurich, he attends the classes of Itten at the Kunstgewerbeschule and of Siegfried Giedion at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. He also studies art history and musical composition at the University. Thanks to Itten and Max Bill, he assimilates the elementary repertory of the forms and colors of Constructivism, as well as the Universalistic spirit of the Bauhaus. He is deeply impressed by Giedion's book, Space, Time and Architecture. Giedion advises him to continue his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. on 1951, Ardon came to Paris and remains there, even though he does not speak French, and lives in straitened circumstances. He eats at the Salvation Army and digs in trash cans for bits of wood and canvas for his plastic research. Eventually, he gets a job as an art teacher in the Jewish Agency's elementary teachers' training college. Meets Brancusi, Léger Herbin, Dewasne. In order to get a foreign-student residence permit, he enrolls at the Atelier d'Art Abstrait of Dewasne and Pillet at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. Robert and Nina Lebel introduce him into the Surrealist circles, and he participates in Surrealist meetings. Agam deals with such problems as the 4th dimension, simultaneity and counterpoint in the visual, plastic arts, and he has extended his experiments to application in the fields of literature, music and art theory. He has developed theatrical projects where the spectators are encircled in a total environment of simultaneous and multiple scenes. In 1963, at the Biennial of Sao Paul.
