Painting: 180° Boogie- Woogie

“In life,” says Yaacov Agam, the son of an Israeli rabbi, “you never can see all that is going on at once.” An old saying? Perhaps, but Agam, 38, has sawed his preaching into visual parables. He paints op art murals that change their spots entirely when the viewer passes by, makes wall constructions whose pieces may be rearranged like bits of hardware in a pegboard, or, mounted on springs, rummaged through as if they were bouquets of clanking metal flowers. He also composes bit-by-bit musical moments that sound like timbrels and woodwinds fumbling randomly up and down a sadly keyed scale. Agam likes to keep things moving.

Agam has gained important commissions from his native Israel. His 29½-ft. by 20-ft. mural (with 30,000 small squares of colored lines and dots), called Double Metamorphosis, bewilders passengers on the liner Shalom. In 1964, he did a 197-ft.-long ceiling mural titled Jacob’s Ladder, which baffles visitors to the National Convention Center in Jerusalem. Each one in its built-in multiple perspectives is a thousand paintings in one.

By corrugating the painting with Vs in relief, and painting each arm of the Vs separately, Agam can reveal two distinct acutely angled surfaces to viewers at the same time. Carefully coloring, choosing geometric forms and calculating the visual bias, Agam can produce picket-fence panoramas which can transit through 180° as the viewer walks by, from black to a myriad rainbow of abstract constructivist shapes to white.

The effect is that of making Mondrian’s Boogie-Woogie paintings swing. Agam calls his works “contrapuntals,” has even named one Homage to Johann Sebastian Bach for its fugue of color. He uses this oblique approach, he says, to avoid the Judaic religious restrictions on graven images. “In flux, one cannot perceive reality, but only a part of it,” he says. As a result, his works may not stand alone impressively enough as masterpieces, but they seem a magnificently practical way to transform blank-walled, vast public wastelands and enormous rooms into lively and provocative architectural gardens.