4: Magritte's Mystery Mashup

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René Magritte
La Durée poignardée (Titled in English as 'Time Transfixed'1), 1938
Oil on canvas, w98.7 cm x h147 cm (38.86" x 57.86")
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL USA

Part of what I find so interesting about Bruegel's Icarus is the way it openly plays around at the intersection of the bizarre with the completely normal2. It's a popular thing for artists to do, so for the next few days, I'm going to look at how a few different people tackle the same thing. 

So we have Magritte, a 20th century Belgian surrealist, and a train coming out of a fireplace. He wrote specifically about this painting in a 1959 letter, saying that he wanted to show "the mystery" of things "that seem familiar to us [out of error or habit]". So let's look at it that way. At the time, both a fireplace and a train would have been an extremely familiar sight for his audience, as they still basically are for us. Individually, we see these objects, and we typically just register the right word clump for their utility/place in our world - 'fireplace' and 'train' - before we stop paying them any further attention. And in the painting, each object is painted with decent realism, which helps us to still see them that way. 

But by putting one of these objects impossibly right on top of the other, Magritte also makes it impossible to take this train and this fireplace for granted. The eyes roam over them more. We register more details. We do, actually, get a sense of mystery from them both, separately and together. The fireplace, which becomes a dark potential doorway, with that looming void of mirror above it. The train, its wheels finely articulated but suspended, making the viewer register the mechanics and weight of trains in a surprising way. That place where they abruptly join each other, the shadow the train casually casts. This painting uses its realistic style to point out how we normally process things, and then makes the brain stutter. 

All in all, Magritte's "Time Transfixed" ultimately works for me as an inversion of "The Fall of Icarus". They both put the real world smack up to a sense of otherworldly mystery. But Bruegel's work uses this juxtaposition to try to kill the otherworldly (somewhat literally); in his work, even the extraordinary can be collapsed to the 'normal'. And Magritte's work is all about creating mystery; in his, everything normal can be seen as extraordinary.

NOTES:
1. The original French title literally translates to 'Ongoing Time Stabbed by a Dagger'. It was created for one of Magritte's patrons, and the artist hoped the painting would be hung at the base of the man's staircase so it would 'stab' guests on their way to the ballroom. (The patron didn't do that.)

2. When things exist exactly on a transformative boundary, this boundary is often referred to as 'liminal space' ('liminal' = from the Latin for 'threshold' — here's a straight definition of the phrase, and one that goes on a bit more). If you ever need to look impressive at a museum, look thoughtfully at a work for awhile and then say that "It seems to occur in a liminal space." This is admittedly a dicey move, because someone might ask you, you know, liminal space between what and you may have to answer, but if you make up something appropriate you'll look smart as hell.