“The Empire of Lights”, an iconic painting by René Magritte, was sold Tuesday evening at Christie’s in New York for $121 million, setting an auction record for the artist, in the centenary year of the surrealist movement.
After about ten minutes of battle at Rockefeller Center, the work was sold for exactly $121,160,000 (commissions and fees included), a record sum for a surrealist work, which also makes it the 11th most expensive painting in the world. history of public auctions, according to an AFP database.
This painting is part of a series of eponymous paintings by the Belgian painter (1898-1967) symbolizing the play of light and shadow that he loved. It represents the paradoxical image of a house at night, lit only by a street lamp, under a blue sky during the day.
“The Empire of Lights” is a very popular Magritte subject, since four of the five paintings by the Belgian master that exceeded $30 million at auction were part of this series, according to AFP data. This was particularly the case for the previous auction record for a work by René Magritte (79 million in 2022).
The painting inspired American director William Friedkin for the famous horror film “The Exorcist” (1973). It was part of the private collection of Mica Ertegun, an interior designer who fled communist Romania to settle in the United States, where she became an influential figure in the arts world. Died at the age of 97 at the end of 2023, she was the wife of Ahmet Ertegun, the music mogul who founded the record company Atlantic Records, known for having “signed” Led Zeppelin.
The surrealist artist’s price has recently exploded according to AFP data, since his five auctions for more than $30 million have all been achieved in the last three years.
The sale of “The Empire of Lights” was expected to be a highlight of this week of fall sales in New York, while the art market has experienced a slowdown since 2023, after a record festival in 2022 emerging from the coronavirus pandemic.
Christie’s, an auction company controlled by Artémis, a holding company of the Pinault family, announced sales of $2.1 billion in the first half of 2024, down for the second consecutive year after the peak of $4.1 billion reached in 2022.
During the same evening of auction Tuesday, an Ed Ruscha painting, “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half,” sold for $68,260,000 million, setting a new auction record for the figure still alive in American pop art (86 years old).
This is the second best auction in history for a living painter, behind “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” by David Hockney (90 million in 2018).
