History

Turning pictures

The oldest surviving example is a portrait panel of about 1535, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Its surface is corrugated. From the left you see Wilhelm, Count von Zimmern; from the right, his wife Amalia.

Similar panels appear across the following century, often with something pointed to say. One of around 1580 in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery pairs a young woman — traditionally identified as Mary, Queen of Scots, though the attribution is not reliable — with a skull. In 1593 Ludovico Buti painted Charles III of Lorraine and his wife Christine on a single ribbed panel, now at the Museo Galileo in Florence.

The technique was published before it was named. Vignola and Danti's treatise on perspective illustrates it in 1583, and Jean François Niceron covers it at length in La perspective curieuse of 1638. Athanasius Kircher supplied the Latin — tabula scalata, roughly “staircase picture” — in 1646, by which point the panels had been in circulation for over a century.

In England they were familiar enough to be used as a figure of speech. In Richard II, written around 1595, Bushy describes perspectives that rightly gazed upon show nothing but confusion; eyed awry distinguish form.

Cabinet and toy

After that the record thins. The technique survives, but as entertainment rather than as a medium: cabinets of curiosities, conjuring manuals, children's toys. The barrier-grid animations sold as Ombro-cinéma in the 1920s belong to the same family, as do the lenticular flicker cards that came in cereal boxes from the 1940s on, once cheap plastics made lens arrays disposable.

Nothing about the method had stopped working. It simply suited nobody. Four centuries of European painting were made to be looked at from the front, hung at eye level, and reproduced flat in books, and a picture that changes when you move fails all three.

Le Mouvement

Le Mouvement opened at the Galerie Denise René in Paris on 6 April 1955 and ran to the 30th. Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp showed as the elders, alongside Jean Tinguely, Jesús Rafael Soto, Pol Bury, Robert Jacobsen, Victor Vasarely, and a 26-year-old Israeli painter called Yaacov Agam. Duchamp's Rotary Demisphere and Calder's mobiles tied the show to the pre-war avant-garde; for most of the rest it was an introduction. Kinetic art is generally dated as a movement from here.

The accompanying leaflet, the Manifeste jaune, named four terms: colour, light, movement, time. The fourth is what separates these works from optical illusions. An illusion is played on a stationary eye; these require the viewer to walk, and take as long as the walk takes.

Agam

He was born Ya'acov Gibstein in Rishon LeZion in May 1928, the son of a rabbi, and began formal schooling at thirteen. He studied in Jerusalem, then in Zurich under Johannes Itten, which put him directly downstream of Bauhaus colour teaching, and moved to Paris in 1951. His first solo exhibition, in 1953, was called Peintures en Mouvement.

What he added to the Renaissance panel was abstraction. A sixteenth-century turning picture carries two portraits and a moral, and there is a right place to stand for each. Agam put abstract colour on the same corrugated surface. With no figure to resolve into, there is no correct viewing position and the work has no front. Double Metamorphosis II of 1964 — oil on corrugated aluminium, now at MoMA, and shown there in The Responsive Eye the following year — reads less as two states than as a continuous field of them.

He worked at architectural scale as well. Between 1972 and 1974 he rebuilt the antechamber to the private apartments of the Élysée Palace for Georges Pompidou as a single kinetic room: walls, ceiling, floor, doors, carpet. Pompidou died in April 1974, before it was finished. The room survives, reassembled at the Centre Pompidou. There is a fountain at La Défense from 1975, and the Fire and Water Fountain in Dizengoff Square, Tel Aviv, from 1986, which adds water, flame and music.

The prints he called agamographs are the domestic version of all this: the same idea at a size you can hold and turn. There are a great many, of uneven quality.

Afterwards

Agam received the Israel Prize for Visual Arts in 2026 and died in Paris on 21 June that year.

Very little of the underlying method is hard. A fold, two images, and some patience with a bone folder. Nothing in the Zimmern panel needed equipment a sixteenth-century workshop lacked, and nothing in a modern one does either. The four centuries went on the question of what it was for.