Lot Essay
This drawing is closely related to the oil painting La durée poignardée, 1938 (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 460; coll. The Art Institute of Chicago), which was probably completed in late July or August. The imagery constituted one of the solutions to problems discussed in the lecture "La ligne de vie," which Magritte delivered in Antwerp in November, 1938: "As regards the railway engine, I made it spring from the hearth of a dining-room fireplace instead of from the usual stove-pipe. This metamorphosis is called 'Time transfixed'." (quoted in ed. D. Sylvester, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 266)
According to Magritte's friend Marcel Mariën this solution came to Magritte in a flash, in contrast to the more usual long and deliberate search which the artist undertook by means of drawings.
The problem of the train may have triggered memories of de Chirico, for the conjunction of a clock and a train is a device used more than once by the painter to suggest the arrest of time... Bringing together two unrelated objects such as a steam engine and a fireplace was standard surrealist practice, but in his search for the affinity that binds one object to another Magritte brings his own brand of logic into play. Not only does the opening in a fireplace suggest the mouth of a railway tunnel but the steam engine and the fireplace are both activated by fuel. The engine is depicted on a miniature scale to become another of Magritte's portable objects. (S. Whitfield, exhibition catalogue, Magritte, London, 1992, no. 81)
According to Magritte's friend Marcel Mariën this solution came to Magritte in a flash, in contrast to the more usual long and deliberate search which the artist undertook by means of drawings.
The problem of the train may have triggered memories of de Chirico, for the conjunction of a clock and a train is a device used more than once by the painter to suggest the arrest of time... Bringing together two unrelated objects such as a steam engine and a fireplace was standard surrealist practice, but in his search for the affinity that binds one object to another Magritte brings his own brand of logic into play. Not only does the opening in a fireplace suggest the mouth of a railway tunnel but the steam engine and the fireplace are both activated by fuel. The engine is depicted on a miniature scale to become another of Magritte's portable objects. (S. Whitfield, exhibition catalogue, Magritte, London, 1992, no. 81)