The Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte has become the latest member of that exclusive club of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million at auction.
On Tuesday night at Christie’s in Manhattan, a version of Magritte’s famously enigmatic subject, “The Empire of Light,” depicting a deserted nocturnal street below a bright daytime sky, sold for $121.2 million with fees, a record for the artist, in a packed, dark gray-painted salesroom, moodily lit in a suitably Surrealist style.
Certain to sell for at least $95 million, courtesy of a guaranteed bid, the painting inspired a 10-minute duel between two telephone bidders. The price was the highest yet paid for a Surrealist work of art at auction, and made Magritte the 16th artist to break the $100 million threshold, according to data compiled by the French market analyst company Artprice.
Fellow nine-figure heavyweights include Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (whose paintings have sold for more than $100 million at no fewer than six auctions). To date, no living artist has achieved this price level at auction.
Painted in 1954 and measuring almost five-feet-high, “The Empire of Light” was the last of 19 works that Christie’s offered from the collection of the socialite, designer and philanthropist Mica Ertegun. It was one of the largest of the 17 versions of this subject that Magritte painted in oil. The best-known is probably the monumental “L’empire des lumières” in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice. Ertegun’s slightly smaller canvas, which she acquired privately in 1968, is the first in the series to include water in the foreground.
“It’s maybe the best,” said Paolo Vedovi, the director of a gallery in Brussels specializing in works by Magritte and other 20th-century artists. “It seems that every big collector now wants a Magritte.”
Vedovi added of the Surrealist’s appeal: “He’s so contemporary. Maybe you get away from this world and bad thinking. You don’t want something that is tough. He is poetic.”
Christie’s sale of the Ertegun collection — along with the 55 big-ticket 20th-century works from other owners that followed — was the art market’s second major test since Donald J. Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the presidential election. The art trade has been in a slump for some two years. Increased stock prices and the prospect of tax cuts for corporations and affluent individuals have raised hopes that wealthy collectors would become more willing to spend their millions at auctions.
On Monday evening at Sotheby’s, bidders had splashed out $216 million with fees on 25 pieces from the collection of the beauty products mogul Sydell L. Miller, who died in March. The works had been estimated to raise some $170 million. A Claude Monet painting of water lilies topped the sale with a price of $65.5 million.
“The election has definitely had an immediate impact on the marketplace,” Brett Gorvy, a founder of the New York-based dealership Lévy Gorvy Dayan, said at the Sotheby’s auction. “The stock market has made people richer. We saw in our gallery the day after the election that deals were done by clients who had hesitated before.”
Gorvy added, “But it could be a honeymoon period.”
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