Artist 50: Yaakov Agam

Yaakov Agam was born in 1928 in Palestine.  He is a sculptor and did experiments in optical and kinetic art.  He got his formal art training at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.  He then moved to Zürich Switzerland in 1949 to study at the Kunstgewerbe Schule.  Then in 1951, Agam moved to Paris where he still lives with his three children.  In 1953 he had his first solo exhibition, and in his 1955 exhibition he established himself as a leading artist of kinetic art.  Agam’s art is characterized by his abstract style in his kinetic art as well as the movement of this piece along with the interaction between the viewer and the artist along with his use of light and sound.  Most of his sculptures are placed in public spaces.  Other than sculptures, Agam was also known for a type of print called the Agamograph, which is a lenticular printing that looks very different when viewed from different angles.  In 1972 he had a retrospective exhibition in Paris and then again in New York in 1980.  Agam is one of the highest selling, most well known Israeli artists.  His works are visually captivating to the viewer because they are not what people expect out of public art.

Artist 49: James Wines

James Wines was born in 1932 and is an American artist and architect.  He deals mainly with environmental design, working to integrate buildings with their surroundings.  This led him to found an architecture and environmental arts organization in 1970 called SITE.  This organization does everything from landscape design to product design.  Since 1969 Wines has lectured in fifty-two countries on various green topics and is currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University.  In 1958 he graduated from Syracuse University and became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.  To jump-start his career as a successful sculptor and graphic designer, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962.  Throughout his career, Wines has taught at several different Academies, Institutions, and Universities, in both the United States as well as abroad.  He very firmly believes that hand drawing is a key element in the artistic process, it does not necessarily have to be perfectly accurate but the action of drawing out what the artist wants to achieve allows them to explore the physical as well as the psychological aspects of each design.  In total James Wines has designed over 150 projects for both the private and public client in eleven different countries.

Artist 48: Norman Carlberg

Norman Carlberg was born in 1928 in Minnesota.  He is a both a sculptor and a printmaker.  Before attending Yale he studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and at the University of Illinois.  In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition that featured his work.  After that he went to Chile to teach for a year and in 1961, Carlberg became the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he taught there until 1966.  Carlberg likes to classify his sculptures as Modular Constructivism, but others also classify his work as Minimalist.  His art is very recognizable in the art community.  The aspect of Carlberg’s work that is modular is very easy for the viewer to spot.  His work characteristically has an element of repetition from a unit to a basic shape.  Many of his sculptures use geometric shapes, and hardedge designs, but they also combine straight edges with curves.  Most of his prints, which he made after 1970, they employ many of the same stylistic elements and are very simplistic.  Because each print contains a modular aspect, his prints can be rotated and repositioned to make a new image.  Carlberg is seen as one of the earliest artists to make Module Art.

Artist 47: Donald Judd

Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Missouri.  In 1948 he enrolled in the Art Students League to study painting and drawing.  After only a few months on the Art Students League he transferred to the College of William and Mary.  In 1949 he transferred again to Columbia University to study philosophy and he began taking classes at the Art Students League again.  By the late 1950s he was experimenting with three-dimensional art and in 1957 he began the master’s program in Art History at Columbia University.  He had his first solo show in 1957; it included only paintings at this time.  By the early 1960s Judd had totally left painting for sculpture.  He combined found objects with industrial materials like, steel, concrete, aluminum, and plywood.  He is said to be at the forefront of the international Minimalist art movement.  Unlike many artists, he was inspired by the architecture, objects, and installation of his peers in the art world.  In his works he removed the human or emotional element and rather than placing his art on a pedestal he placed it directly on the gallery floor of his shows.  In 1965 he began to experiment with sculpture that moved up the walls of galleries.  Between 1962 and 1967 he taught at different Institutes, Colleges, and Universities. 

Artist 46: Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely was born in Hungary in 1906.  His art can be classified as Op art.  In 1925 he began his medical studies at Budapest University but two years later he gave up on medicine to study painting.  In 1928 he enrolled at Sandor Bortnyik’s workshop and in 1930 he marries a fellow student.  After his time at the workshop he worked at a ball-bearing company, in accounting and designing posters for advertising.  In the 1930s Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist.  He combined patterns and organic images in his designs.  When he got married he moved from Hungary to Paris to work as a graphic artist and a creative consultant at different advertising agencies.  Vasarely went on to create sculptures and other works that focused on optical illusion.  He developed his personal style of geometric abstract art; he used various materials but a very limited number of forms and colors.  Throughout his years he tried his hand at several types of art including a large kinematic form, industrial design and serigraphs.  In March of 1997 Vasarely died at the age of 90 in Paris.

Artist 45: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in 1886 in Germany.  He is one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.  He worked for his father in his stone-carving shop and he also worked for several local design firms.  He then moved to Berlin where he worked for the interior designer Bruno Paul.  In 1908 he began his apprenticeship of architecture.  In 1912 he set out on his own, receiving many independent commissions.  At the start of his career he was designing upper class homes, his style was a return to the purity of the nineteenth century.  He began to develop projects that embodied a harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society.  He openly abandoned ornament when he proposed at 1921 all-glass skyscraper.  He emphasized the straightforward display of materials and forms, believing that the way in which every architectural element is arranged, especially the character of enclosed space, must contribute to a unified expression.  In 1930 Mies served as the last Director of the Bauhaus school and in 1933 he was forced to close the school due to Nazi pressure.  He moved to the United States in 1937 and in 1944 he became a citizen.  He continued to create architectural pieces of artwork and pursued his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century.

Artist 44: Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson, born in Cleveland, Ohio, was an American architect.  He studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.  He is most known for his buildings entirely clad in glass.  In 1930 he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.  In his undergraduate at Harvard, Johnson focused mainly on history and philosophy.  He also took several trips to Europe, these trips where his introduction to his fascination with architecture.  In 1932 Johnson and two of his friends put on a show at the Museum of Modern Art, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”.  This show by Johnson, Barr and Hitchcock was seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public.  He created what is seen as his masterpiece in 1949, the Glass House.  This house has a floor of bricks and the sides are made from glass and charcoal-painted steel.  On his property just fifty feet away from his glass house, sits his guest house, which was made entirely out of bricks with the exception of three large circular windows.  This building was an exact opposite of his glass house.  One of his other most well known buildings was the Seagram Building.  He worked along side Mies van der Rohe as associate architect in 1956.  This caused his practice to grow allowing him to take on larger public projects.  In 2005 Johnson died in his sleep at his glass house getaway.