“L’empire des lumières“ by René Magritte broke records after selling for $121 million at auction; the Belgian surrealist now joins a small group of artists whose works have sold for nine figures.
While high price tags are nothing new in the art world, it is not every day that a singular work sells for nine figures. Living artists rarely experience selling their art for such a price; even among those who have passed away, such an occurrence is not commonplace. Recently, Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” (1954) joined this list of record-breaking paintings during Christie’s MICA: The Collection of Mica Ertegun auction, which featured prized possessions from the late Romanian-American interior designer and philanthropist. The Magritte piece, which Christie’s penned as the “crown jewel of Ertegun’s panoramic collection,” sold for an impressive $121 million after a tense 10-minute bidding war, though it was initially valued at $95 million.
As Scott Reyburn reports for The New York Times, Magritte is the 16th artist to cross such a threshold, standing alongside familiar and frequent names like Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol.
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A Popular Image
Magritte made a name for himself through dreamlike, sometimes unsettling paintings that carry an air of mystery to them. Many will recognize him for his works “The Son of Man” and “The Treachery of Images” — a painting of a pipe that sported the famous line “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (translated to “This is not a pipe”). While it illustrates a pipe, it is not the object itself and simply a visual representation, showcasing the illusory aspects of images, and their complex relationship with language and human perception as a whole.
“L’empire des Lumières,” in typical Magritte fashion, also plays with the senses through strange imagery: in this case, a dim, lamplit street juxtaposed with a bright blue sky above, making viewers wonder what time of day it is. The piece is one from a series of similar paintings that came about during the 1954 Venice Biennale. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Surrealism, the event held a retrospective of Magritte’s work in the Belgian Pavillion, so the artist created the first “L’empire des lumières” as one of his more recent compositions, according to Christie’s.
The piece received plenty of attention, so much so that Magritte ended up promising it to three different buyers. Ultimately, it was collector Peggy Guggenheim who purchased the first and arguably most famous piece.
For quite some time, Magritte pieces were seldom found in the public market; yet demand for the artist— and on a larger scale, surrealist works—has significantly increased over the past three decades, as Anna Brady reveals in a Buyer’s Guide for The Art Newspaper. The catalyst for this surge was likely the Christie’s New York auction of lawyer and writer Harry Torczyner’s collection in 1998. It saw the sale of a number of Magritte works, including “Les Valeurs Personnelles” (1952), which sold for $7.1 million. Then in a 2017 Christie’s Auction, “La Corde Sensible” (1960) broke the artist’s personal records by selling for $14.4m; it was then superseded by “Le Principe du Plaisir” (1937), which sold for $26.8 million in a 2018 Sotheby’s New York auction. Yet as art dealer Emmanuel Di Donna reveals in Brady’s feature, more Magritte works were sold for higher prices in private sales.
Many But Not the Same
To make it up to the other interested buyers, Magritte created a series of other “L’empire des Lumières” paintings that were similar, but possessed marked differences in things like visual elements, orientation, and medium. As Judd Tully of The Art Newspaper reports, Ertegun’s “L’empire des lumières” has shattered the record previously set by another version of the piece from 1961 (in landscape format), which sold for $79.4 million with fees in 2022.
The Ertegun’s painting was originally created for Belgian collector Willy van Hove, as Christie’s explains in its release. While it is not the original piece, it is one of the finest among the series, expanding on Magritte’s first painting through a more uncanny atmosphere on a larger canvas. It is also the first in the series that introduces a body of water — something Magritte would keep in later versions.
“Each iteration in the series, which Magritte worked at for 15 years, is distinct,” explains Max Carter, Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at Christie’s. “Some are large, some small. Some are vertical, others horizontal. In some, the house is set back, in others it fully occupies the foreground. Here, Magritte achieves everything that makes these paintings so remarkable: the quality of light and watery animation, the vertical orientation and razor-sharp contrast between night and day.”
Banner photo from the Christie’s website.
