In the recent letter “Einsteinian subtleties in Magritte’s Time Transfixed” (Physics Today, April 2021, page 10), the author, Robert Fleck, candidly admits that “there is no evidence that [René] Magritte intended to represent … Einsteinian ideas in his painting” (shown below). The temptation to dismiss the whole piece as a purely subjective and arbitrary association is rather strong, but there are perhaps tenuous links that might save it from scorn.
The word durée in the French title of the painting, La durée poignardée, would have had for Magritte and his contemporaries the unmistakable association to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Before World War I, Bergson was something of a superstar: His lectures were attended by large crowds, and just about everybody knew the buzzword durée.
Bergson’s durée is not time but rather something else: What his philosophy emphasized is that personally experienced time (la durée) is totally different from objective time. “Bergson sees spatialization as the hallmark of the inauthentic, mechanized time of science,” wrote a commentator,1 and that idea seems to fit Magritte’s picture rather well.
Time Transfixed, by René Magritte, oil on canvas (1938), Art Institute of Chicago. (Image from Peter Barritt/ Alamy Stock Photo.)
Time Transfixed, by René Magritte, oil on canvas (1938), Art Institute of Chicago. (Image from Peter Barritt/ Alamy Stock Photo.)
A mirror mechanically sends back inverted images but does not turn back time: “Reading the picture” spatially from left to right, the spectator notes that the reflection of the second candleholder is missing in the otherwise realistic representation. The locomotive, another mechanical device, irreversibly transmutes the internal energy of coal into external movement. The original thoughts that Bergson developed at length were badly damaged when Einstein’s special theory of relativity became known. To say that they were stabbed (poignardées) could be an eloquent image.
Jimena Canales recently published a book about a confrontation between Bergson and Einstein2 that took place in April 1922. Later that year Bergson published the monograph Durée et simultanéité (Duration and Simultaneity) about Einstein’s theory. The book, if not the historical meeting, is something that Magritte might have known about. So perhaps there is a roundabout way to connect more convincingly the picture and Einstein.
Magritte commented on the association to Bergson in a letter he wrote decades after he had finished the painting and given it the title La durée poignardée: “You think of Bergson and Proust when you look at this painting,” he said. However, he had already discussed the title in an earlier letter he sent to his friend Marcel Mariën sometime around the painting’s production. A pen-and-ink sketch of the painting occupies the upper part of the sheet, and on the last line of text below it, Magritte asks his friend if he would like to “meditate” about it.
For avid readers of popular-science articles, trains and clocks have become suggestive of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but there is no evidence of Magritte’s interest in such matters. “Nevertheless, the associations between Magritte’s art and Einstein’s science are striking,” Fleck notes in his conclusion. At that point, it seems that the linking is his own personal construct, prompted apparently by an invented English translation. But the full story might be more subtle: “Einstein Meets Magritte” was the title of a 1995 interdisciplinary conference, held in Brussels, that became the basis for a series of volumes published over the years.3 The pairing of the two names is indeed striking, even if it has not been found to be particularly productive. “I believe that Einstein and Magritte would not have much to say each to the other,” drily noted Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine during the original conference.4
“The chance encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”5 became a popular quote in the history of surrealism, as bringing together widely disparate objects has been a major occupation for surrealists. The method was also adopted by Magritte, who argued that it is the clash of images that generates ideas.
So we might recapitulate: The image came first, followed by the title and its translation, then the conference, Fleck’s letter, and, finally, this note.
