As this year’s centennial celebrations of Surrealism come to a close, Belgian painter René Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” (1954) sold for a whopping $121.16 million at Christie’s on Tuesday, November 19, eclipsing its $95 million estimate.
The auction house noted in a press statement that the painting is the most expensive Surrealist work sold at auction and achieved a world record for the artist. After a feverish bidding war between two clients over the phone, the hammer came down in just under 10 minutes during Christie’s sale of the collection of the late interior designer Mica Ertegun.
Quintessential to Magritte’s oeuvre, “L’empire des lumières” portrays a home with a warm-toned lamppost casting a yellow glow over the building and its rippling reflection in the body of water in front of it. Slightly shrouded by silhouetted trees, the house itself is depicted during late evening or night time, while the sky above it is a soft daytime blue with cotton-like cumulus clouds stagnating over the composition. Separately, the two scenes are serene if not comforting — but their uncanny union and incongruity sparks both curiosity and unease.
Magritte ruminated on this particular night-and-day phenomenon in over a dozen similar paintings executed in both oil and gouache. Esteemed from the start, a separate iteration of “L’empire des lumières” garnered quite a bit of fanfare in the Belgian pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale before ending up in the collection of Peggy Guggenheim. Magritte apparently appeased the unmet demands of disappointed buyers by converting the work into a series over 15 years.
Max Carter, vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, described this particular iteration of “L’empire des lumières” from Ertegun’s collection as “arguably the finest, most deftly rendered and hauntingly beautiful of the series” in a statement ahead of the sale. The Romanian-American interior designer, philanthropist, and collector of Surrealist and contemporary art died last December at the age of 97, and a portion of the proceeds from sales of her collection will be distributed among several philanthropic initiatives to continue her legacy.
The Magritte sale is not the only milestone for the Surrealist movement this month: On Monday, November 18, Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) founder Eduardo Constantini snapped up Leonora Carrington’s sculptural magnum opus “La Grande Dame” (1951) for over $11.3 million at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Sale in New York, only months after shattering Carrington’s auction record by purchasing her iconic painting “Les Distractions de Dagobert” (1945) for a $28.5 million in May.
