Hungarian-French painter Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) was a precocious talent. His earliest surviving painting, a landscape done at age 12, baffled through its realism--an indication of the compelling illusions of spatial depth that would later define his dazzling universe. Inspired by the likes of Malevich and the Bauhaus school, Vasarely developed his own abstract-geometric visual language, exploring the relationship between pure form and pure...