Einsteinian subtleties in Magritte’s Time Transfixed

In his 1938 painting La durée poignardé (Time Transfixed; shown below), Belgian surrealist René Magritte presents a surprising and enigmatic juxtaposition of common and unrelated images—a smoke-belching locomotive charging out of a fireplace topped by a clock and two candlesticks, all beneath a large mirror in an otherwise typical interior space.

Albert Einstein was interested in clock synchronization, particularly as it pertained to time signals for railroad schedules and longitude determination. ¹ One of his many gedanken experiments demonstrated the lack of timing agreement between two observers, one on a moving train and the other standing near the tracks. ² Simultaneity—and hence time and space—is relative.

Magritte’s fireplace finds a connection with Einstein through the 1930s fireplace (see next page) located in Common Room 202 of Jones Hall (formerly Fine Hall) at Princeton University. Einstein had an office there when he first came to Princeton from Germany. Inscribed on the fireplace is a remark Einstein had made during a 1921 visit to Princeton: “Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht,” commonly translated as “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” ³ Magritte would probably prefer “surreal” to Einstein’s “subtle.”

And what of Magritte’s mirror? Mirrors figure prominently in the Michelson interferometer that was used in the notably unsuccessful attempt to detect the putative luminiferous ether. Also, precision mirrors were used at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to detect gravitational waves, 100 years after Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity predicted them, from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. ⁴

Although there is no evidence that Magritte intended to represent those Einsteinian ideas in his painting, surrealists were nonetheless thoroughly engaged with modern physics; they referred repeatedly to relativity and quantum physics in their writings and often interpreted those new sciences through their work. ⁵

The two candlesticks, one of which is mysteriously missing its mirror reflection, remain for now outside the bounds of even a coincidental relativistic connection to Magritte’s famous painting. Nevertheless, the associations between Magritte’s art and Einstein’s science are striking and help to situate the painting in the broader intellectual and cultural compass of its transfixed time.