Yaacov Agam, Father of Kinetic Art, Dead at 98

The Israeli artist who invented art in motion — Galerie Craven, Paris, 1953 — leaves behind a market, a method, and a movement. Ahead of Calder. Ahead of Vasarely. Ahead of everyone.

Yaacov Agam, the Israeli sculptor and painter recognized worldwide as the father of kinetic art, died Sunday in Paris at 98. The cause was not immediately disclosed. His funeral procession will leave the military cemetery in Rehovot on Monday at 5:00 p.m. local time.

Agam's work changed what a painting could be. He took a flat surface and made it conditional. The image on the left wall is not the image in the center is not the image from the right. A viewer who stood still saw one Agam. A viewer who walked saw a different Agam. He called it perpetual becoming. The art world called it kinetic art. The market called it the highest-grossing Israeli artist in auction history.

Other names attached themselves to the movement later — Alexander Calder, Victor Vasarely, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely. Agam was first. Galerie Craven, Paris, 1953 — the first one-man show in the history of art composed entirely of works in motion. The clock for kinetic art starts there.

Funeral and shiva

• Public viewing — Yaacov Agam Museum plaza, Rishon LeZion. Monday, 22 June 2026 (7 Tammuz 5786), 14:00–16:00 local time.
• Funeral procession — Leaves the military cemetery in Rehovot, Monday at 17:00.
• Shiva — Family is sitting shiva at the Yaacov Agam Museum. Tuesday through Friday, 10:00–13:00. Tuesday and Wednesday also 16:00–20:00.
• Museum — Yaacov Agam Museum of Art (YAMA), Misha"r 1, Rishon LeZion. Tel: 03-5555-900 · yama.co.il.

Fast facts — Yaacov Agam

• Birth — Born Yaacov Gibstein in Rishon LeZion, May 11, 1928.
• Death — Died Paris, June 21, 2026, age 98.
• Movement — Father of kinetic art. First solo exhibition of moving work: Galerie Craven, Paris, 1953.
• Training — Bezalel Academy under Mordecai Ardon, Zurich under Johannes Itten, Paris from 1951.
• Latrun — Detained at Latrun during the British Black Sabbath roundups, 1946.
• Israel Prize — 2026 Israel Prize for Visual Arts.
• UNESCO — Honored by UNESCO with the Jan Amos Comenius Medal for the Agam Method of visual education.
• International honors — First prize for artistic research, São Paulo Biennale, 1963. Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (France).
• Market — Highest-grossing Israeli artist at auction in market history.
• Family — Survived by three children including photographer Ron Agam and musician Oram Agam, and his brother Hanania Gibstein, former mayor of Rishon LeZion.

From the dunes of Rishon LeZion

Agam was born Yaacov Gibstein in Rishon LeZion in May 1928 — twenty years before the founding of the State of Israel. His father, Rabbi Yehoshua Gibstein, was a rabbi and a kabbalist. The household was deeply religious. The Torah forbids graven images. Agam would spend his entire life answering that prohibition with art that has no fixed image to forbid.

As a child he ran from school to the dunes outside town. The wind reshaped them between morning and dusk. He never forgot it. Decades later, every Agam wall, every Agam fountain, every Agam menorah was a dune.

In 1946, at eighteen, he was swept up in the British Black Sabbath roundups and held at Latrun. He returned to study at Bezalel under Mordecai Ardon. In 1949 he moved to Zurich, studied with Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus, absorbed Max Bill. By 1951 he was in Paris.

The invention — Paris, 1953

Galerie Craven, 1953. Agam mounted the first one-man exhibition in art history composed entirely of works that moved. "Art in Motion." The reviews were good enough that the gallery world moved fast. The follow-up group show, "Le Mouvement," gathered the artists whose work centered on motion. The kinetic movement had a starting line, a name, and a father.

From there the trajectory was uninterrupted. The first Biennale in Paris. The São Paulo Biennale in 1963, where he took first prize for artistic research. MoMA. The Guggenheim. The Centre Pompidou. Retrospectives in capital cities for the next sixty years.

Yaacov Agam's ten most important works

1. Galerie Craven, Paris, 1953 — the founding kinetic exhibition.
2. Double Metamorphosis III — accessioned by the Centre Pompidou in 1965.
3. La Défense monumental fountain — Paris, 1975.
4. Fire and Water Fountain — Dizengoff Square, Tel Aviv, 1986. The most-photographed public artwork in Israel.
5. 32-foot Hanukkah menorah — Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, New York, in front of the Plaza Hotel. Guinness-recognized as the largest Hanukkah menorah in the world. Lit every December.
6. Faith — Visual Pray — presented to Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2014.
7. Eurovision Song Contest winner's trophy — Jerusalem, 1999.
8. Major retrospectives — Musée National d'Art Moderne (Paris), Guggenheim (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York).
9. The Yaacov Agam Museum of Art — Rishon LeZion. Opened 2017. The only museum in the world dedicated to art in motion.
10. The Agam Method — a visual-language curriculum developed with the Weizmann Institute, taught in Israeli kindergartens, honored by UNESCO.

Why the market took him seriously

Agam ended his career as the highest-grossing Israeli artist at international auction. Not the most adored by Israeli critics — a fight he lost and publicly noted he lost. The most expensive. Galleries in Paris, London, New York and Hong Kong moved Agams as a recognized asset class for collectors who wanted Israeli provenance with international liquidity.

A quieter datapoint tells the same story. Earlier this year the Israeli press confirmed that the Iranian regime had quietly accumulated at least ten Agam works inside the country. Authoritarian governments do not stockpile art they consider worthless. They stockpile art they cannot publicly display and cannot bring themselves to destroy.

The Agam Method

Agam built a parallel business that almost no other artist of his rank attempted. Working with the science teaching department at the Weizmann Institute, he developed a visual-language curriculum — the Agam Method — taught for decades in Israeli kindergartens and schools and honored by UNESCO with the Jan Amos Comenius Medal. The premise: children should learn to see in shapes, colors and patterns before they learn to spell. He licensed it, defended it in court, and invested hundreds of thousands of his own dollars in it. In a 2001 interview he called the underinvestment in it his life's failure. He was wrong about that. The method outlived him.

The Israel Prize, then Paris

In April 2026, weeks before his death and confined to a wheelchair, Agam received the Israel Prize for Visual Arts at a small ceremony inside the museum bearing his name in Rishon LeZion. The prize committee wrote that he had "broken the boundaries of plastic art as it was known and created new languages of kinetic art and Op art," with the central innovation being "internal change" — both in the work itself and in the viewer's shifting point of view.

"Creativity," Agam told the room, "is the basis of Judaism." He had been making that argument for ninety-eight years. The prize was the State's quiet acknowledgement that he had been right the entire time.

The image was never fixed

The fountain in Dizengoff will keep turning. The menorah on Fifth Avenue will light again in December. The dune outside Rishon LeZion will keep shifting in the wind. The image was never fixed. That was always the point. Agam gave it form for seventy-three years.

May his memory be a blessing.

Further reading: Yaacov Agam covered in Olam, the global Jewish business publication.