Fluttering Hearts in a Storage Bin

I love my job, I really do. Three days ago I had to root through a plastic storage bin looking for an issue of DIRECTION magazine -- with a classic Paul Rand cover -- that had just been sold. I knew where it was, I just needed to extract it -- I would find my DIRECTION in the storage bin full of miscellaneous periodicals purchased from a Boston estate a few years ago.

This particular estate belonged to an NYC-based Art Director and Commercial Artist straight from the Old School. He studied with Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia (and was credited with snapping the frontis portrait in BRODOVITCH by Kerry William Purcell) before heading to NYC to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System. Assigned to the Office of War Information for the duration of World War II, he was very active in both the AIGA and NYC ADC, as well as holding teaching and administrative positions at Pratt and the Cooper Union.

I learned all this backstory after moving 15 boxes of Design material from the Back Bay Condominium where this Art Director retired after his years as a serious Gotham Scenester. Judging from the amount of Gallery Exhibition Guides he saved, he went to every NYC-Modern Art event from the mid-thirties to the late seventies. He saved everything, making his living situation somewhat cluttered; and complicating the lives of his heirs. His daughter contacted me after his death with the opportunity to make an offer on the remains of her father's Design Library. I always love going back to Boston .

Several years later, the ever-dwindling, miscellaneous ephemera and periodicals from this estate are now stored in a single plastic bin in my office. I was pretty sure the DIRECTION was near the bottom of this bin. I carefully unstacked the magazines in the bin, all the time wishing I had the time to catalog every single item: Zwart, Tanning, Zwart, Avedon, Sutnar, Tschichold -- no shortage of good stuff here. Burrowing halfway through the stack, I uncovered an old, oversized magazine in stiff wrappers covered with a plain, hand-made white cover. I lifted the flap and pulled back the cover and my eyes dilated over Marcel Duchamp's brilliantly lithographed Coeurs Volants -- his Fluttering Hearts cover for Cahiers D'Art Nos 1/2, 1936.



Back in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression, this struggling Commercial artist in New York City acquired this Parisian Avant-Garde Broadside and fully comprehended the importance of Duchamp's cover contribution. He had the prescience to hand-make an archival paper slipcover for this magazine, so the grasping fingers of time wouldn't mar the beautiful vibrating Duchamp surface. The cover was neatly detached from the textblock along the spine juncture, but otherwise in wonderful unfingered condition. Finding an original print of one of the iconic images of Modern Art makes you forget about DIRECTION magazine for a little while. Examining the slipcover felt like overhearing a conversation in a crowded bistro, one artist speaking to another.

From the catalogue raisonne on Marcel Duchamp by Arturo Schwarz: "[that particular] issue contained Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia's essay 'Coeurs Volants' ('Fluttering Hearts'), a study of Duchamp's optical works. Duchamp made a paper collage composed of three hearts alternating the blue, red, and blue. The strong color contrasts between the red and blue create the illusion of 'fluttering' hearts. He spoke of the project at a later date: 'At a time when I was working on the Rotorelief series in 1935 or thereabouts, I remember having a conversation with an optical physicist who told me about 'Fluttering Hearts' as one of the classic examples in the study of optics. Without carrying my investigations any further than that, I applied this old idea of 'Fluttering Hearts' to my cover (without even looking at any of the reproductions, probably in colour, in the official textbooks). I kept the title 'Fluttering Hearts'. There are many combinations of 2 colors that give the desired effect, especially in dim light."

The flat winter sun streamed through my office window and bounced around on the Cahiers cover. The magazine vibrated in my hands. Life was good. Then I noticed more of the Art Director's artistic handiwork -- he had signed his name in a tiny cursive scrawl to form the crossbar of the A in CAHIERS. Like R. Mutt before him, he had sketched his own little mustache on a masterpiece -- signing his name on another work and forever shifting the art world a tiny bit off its axis, forever defacing and changing it.

I leaned back in my Aeron Chair and recalled George C. Scott chewing the scenery in Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard -- I read your book!" I replaced the lid to the storage bin and said " Rommel-- you magnificent bastard -- I have your book ..." Nobody heard me.