1946. Studies painting at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Pupil of Mordecai Ardon, graduate of the Weimar Bauhaus. (18 yrs old) 19

1949. Mordecai Ardon advises him to continue his studies in Zurich and recommends him to Johannes Itten, and he studies with Itten and Sigfried Giedion, along with courses in art history and musicaInfluenced by Giedion’s “Space, Time, and Architecture.” (21 yrs old) 20

Itten

●  Agam’s Father

TT: How did your father being a rabbi and Judaism influence your work?

YA: It is written in the Bible not to do a graven image. The sixth commandment is not to kill, the eighth is not to steal and thesecond is not to make a graven image. I saw the negative calling for a positive.

So I tried all these processes, slowly, slowly trying

to find a way to get out of the static image. I designed a piece of artwork, it looked nice, but then I turned

it around and it also looked good. So I already had a painting that looks good in two positions. Then I found three and four. I got outof the painting that has only one position. Then I took nails and I put different shapes on the [heads of] the nails and put them in different places on the painting, so I was already exploring possibilities [besides static painting].

My first breakthrough was when I found two, three, four positions for one painting. Here I have found endless positions [points to the Beating Heart]. It has many positions, but whenyou take a regular sculpture, it stands still in time. I designed my sculpture to be in time. In Chinese the word for “crisis” and“opportunity” is the same, so the crisis of “don’t do it” gave me the

possibility to do something else. It allowed me to develop something to overcome the problem of [graven images].

●  Theater

The play is Mr. Agam’s multistaged production of “Variations on the Same Theme: Journeys Among the Dead,” Mr. Ionesco’s first play since “Man with Bags,” which opened in 1978.

csmonitor.com/1980/1022/102200.html

nytimes.com/1980/09/30/archives/rift-involving-ionesco-play-delays-new-york-opening-thats-cacophony.html

●  Rembrant, Dore, Van Gogh

• Johannes Itten

Johannes Itten Painter – Biography, Facts and Paintings

All Designers know about Itten color wheel. The Itten invention is also known as the twelve-part color circle. It’s a graphical scheme that consists of geometric shapes of different colors. Here’s how it looks:

●  Max Brill

note about influence with polished metal sculptures?

●  Sigfried Giedion

Sigfried Giedion was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. Wikipedia

Giedion’s influence on McLuhan..

Siegfried Giedion, whose ideas on the element of time in art and architecture impressed him.

●  Mordecai Ardon, graduate of the Weimar Bauhaus

Studying with Mordecai Ardon, a former student at the Weimar Bauhaus, he discovered the differences between othercultures which stress the afterlife and the Hebrew culture which emphasizes the present. Because Judaism believes life is dynamic and ever-changing, Agam determined that static paintings were inadequate to express the constantly occurring changes which surround us.l