Victor Vasarely

Vasarely designed the Renault logo in 1972, with his son Yvaral. The angular diamond went onto cars from the Renault 5 onwards and lasted two decades. He was born Vasarhelyi Gyozo in Pecs, Hungary, in 1906. He studied medicine for two years at university in Budapest before abandoning it for art, training at the Muhely school, widely regarded as the Budapest Bauhaus. He moved to Paris in 1930 and worked as a commercial graphic designer for years, successful enough to fund his private experiments in geometric abstraction. His 1937 work Zebra, two interlocking black-and-white shapes that appear to oscillate, is considered one of the earliest examples of Op Art, decades before the movement had a name. The Vega series from the 1960s and 1970s, with their swelling, spherical distortions of grid patterns that seem to push out of the canvas surface, became his most recognisable works. In 1982, 154 of his serigraphs were taken to space aboard the French-Soviet Salyut 7 spacecraft and later sold for the benefit of UNESCO. He died in Paris in 1997, aged ninety.