René Magritte, “L’empire des lumières” (1954), oil on canvas, 57 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches (145.4 x 113 cm) (picture courtesy Christie’s, New York)
As this 12 months’s centennial celebrations of Surrealism come to an in depth, Belgian painter René Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” (1954) offered for a whopping $121.16 million at Christie’s on Tuesday, November 19, eclipsing its $95 million estimate.
The public sale home famous in a press assertion that the portray is the most costly Surrealist work offered at public sale and achieved a world file for the artist. After a feverish bidding battle between two shoppers over the telephone, the hammer got here down in slightly below 10 minutes throughout Christie’s sale of the gathering of the late inside designer Mica Ertegun.
Quintessential to Magritte’s oeuvre, “L’empire des lumières” portrays a house with a warm-toned lamppost casting a yellow glow over the constructing and its rippling reflection within the physique of water in entrance of it. Barely shrouded by silhouetted timber, the home itself is depicted throughout late night or evening time, whereas the sky above it’s a gentle daytime blue with cotton-like cumulus clouds stagnating over the composition. Individually, the 2 scenes are serene if not comforting — however their uncanny union and incongruity sparks each curiosity and unease.
Magritte ruminated on this specific night-and-day phenomenon in over a dozen related work executed in each oil and gouache. Esteemed from the beginning, a separate iteration of “L’empire des lumières” garnered fairly a little bit of fanfare within the Belgian pavilion on the 1954 Venice Biennale earlier than ending up within the assortment of Peggy Guggenheim. Magritte apparently appeased the unmet calls for of disenchanted patrons by changing the work right into a sequence over 15 years.
Max Carter, vice chairman of twentieth and twenty first century artwork at Christie’s, described this specific iteration of “L’empire des lumières” from Ertegun’s assortment as “arguably the finest, most deftly rendered and hauntingly beautiful of the series” in a press release forward of the sale. The Romanian-American inside designer, philanthropist, and collector of Surrealist and up to date artwork died final December on the age of 97, and a portion of the proceeds from gross sales of her assortment will likely be distributed amongst a number of philanthropic initiatives to proceed her legacy.
The Magritte sale just isn’t the one milestone for the Surrealist motion this month: On Monday, November 18, Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Artwork (MALBA) founder Eduardo Constantini snapped up Leonora Carrington’s sculptural magnum opus “La Grande Dame” (1951) for over $11.3 million at Sotheby’s Trendy Night Sale in New York, solely months after shattering Carrington’s public sale file by buying her iconic portray “Les Distractions de Dagobert” (1945) for a $28.5 million in Might.
