(New York) The empire of lightsan 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.
Posted at 9:09 p.m.
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 work of surrealism, which also makes it one of the most expensive paintings of history at auction.
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 painting inspired the 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 for 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 auction of this painting was expected to be a highlight of this week of fall sales in New York, during which hundreds of works of art will change hands for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The previous record for a work by René Magritte sold at auction stood at $79 million in 2022, again for a painting from the series The empire of lights.
The art market has experienced a serious slowdown since 2023, after a very prosperous year and a record-breaking year in 2022 at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The auction company controlled by Artémis, a shareholder 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, at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
