Featured Fact: Marcel Duchamp’s Fluttering Heart

The perfect Valentine, Marcel Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants was designed with the physiological optics of German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in mind—when moved laterally before the eyes, the hearts quite literally flutter! 

Coeurs Volants was created as a collaboration with Cahiers d’Art in 1936; it appeared on the cover of Volume XI, nos. 1-2.