The amount is simply crazy. Tuesday evening, a painting by Belgian painter René Magritte was sold for $121 million at an auction held at Christie's in New York. The table The empire of lights thus becoming one of the most expensive paintings in history. It is above all a record for a work of surrealism, of which the Belgian artist was one of the masters. It took a battle of around ten minutes to see the sale price soar. Who bought it? For the moment, we ignore it.
This 1954 painting with many shades of blue shows a house at night lit by a street lamp under a blue daytime sky. It belonged to the architect Mica Ertegun. Passionate about art, this woman of Romanian origin died in 2023 at the age of 97. Over the course of her life, she had built an incredible collection of works of art with her husband Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006. This man behind the record label Atlantic Records was one of the most important figures in music in the United States. For years, The empire of lights had taken pride of place in their chic New York living room, reports The World.
A work that inspired the film “The Exorcist”
This painting is part of a series of eponymous paintings by Magritte, born in 1898 and died in 1967. A work symbolizing the play of light and shadow that he was so fond of. The painting inspired the American director William Friedkin for the famous horror film The exorcist released in 1973. 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.
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The sale of this work 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 at the release of the Covid-19 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.
On Tuesday evening, a painting by Ed Ruscha was sold for $68 million, setting a new auction record for this still-living figure of American pop art.
