This Surrealist Masterpiece by René Magritte Sold for Over $120 Million

A 1954 painting by René Magritte, L’empire des lumières, has just sold for $121.2 million. The painting surpassed its $95 million estimate at Christie’s New York this week, making it the first Magritte work ever to sell for nine figures.

Magritte is known for his Surrealist style, often placing everyday objects or figures in strange scenes and scenarios.

L’empire des lumières depicts a house near a pond, enveloped in the dark of night with only a street lamp and interior windows illuminating it. The treetops above the house, untouched by the light, are entirely black. However, the sky above the house is bright blue and filled with fluffy white clouds, as if it were the middle of the day.

In 1966, Magritte explained the concept, per Christie’s: “After I had painted L’empire des lumières, I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it’s in keeping with our knowledge: in the world night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others.) But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic is the visible image of the picture.”

The artist became somewhat fixated on this idea. He created 27 different versions of L’empire des lumières, and each shows the same scene: a dark house (or houses) with a bright blue sky above. 

The high price of this sale comes at a time when many have been fretting over a sluggish global art market. Artnet’s Katya Kazakina reports that two telephone bidders went head-to-head via Christie’s staffers Alex Rotter and Xin Li-Cohen.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” Kazakina reports. “Almost ten minutes into the proceeding, Rotter was on top with a $105 million bid, and Li-Cohen signaled that her client was bowing out. The room erupted in applause. The buyer’s premium brought the total to $121.2 million.”

Brett Gorvy, a founder of the art gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, tells the New York Times’ Scott Reyburn that the large number could be influenced by the current political climate.

“The election has definitely had an immediate impact on the marketplace,” Gorvy says. “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.”

But, Gorvy notes, “it could be a honeymoon period.”

Two other Magritte works went up for sale at the auction. Those paintings, La cour d’amour (1960) and La Mémoire (1945), sold for $10.53 million and $3.68 million respectively. The impressive number for L’empire des lumières stole the show and further cemented Magritte’s legacy as a painter.

“The motif is one of the few truly iconic images in 20th-century art,” Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th- to 21st-century art, tells CNN’s Karina Tsui.

Carter adds, “When icons appear on the market, they create their own market dynamic.”

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.