Painting by René Magritte has broken a record, selling for more than $121 million at a Christie's auction in New York.
The iconic 1954 painting was estimated at $95 million, beating the previous record for a work by Magritte (1898-1967) of $79 million, set in 2022.
After nearly 10 minutes of bidding, "Empire of Light" ("L'Empire des lumieres") sold for $121,160,000, "achieving a world record price for the artist and for a surrealist work of art at auction," according to auction house Christie's.
The painting — depicting a house at night, lit by a lamp on a pole, against a bright, blue sky — is one of the Belgian artist’s most notable works.
“Empire of Light” is part of the private collection of Mika Ertegun, an interior designer who fled communist Romania to settle in the United States, where she became an influential figure in the art world.
She died in late 2023. She was married to the late Ahmet Ertegun, a music mogul who founded the Atlantic Records label.
The sale of the Magritte painting was an expected highlight of the fall sales season in New York this week, at a time when the art market has been slowing since last year.
Christie’s, which is controlled by Artemis, the investment holding company owned by the Pinault family, said sales in the first half of this year totaled $2.1 billion.
This is the second consecutive year of decline since a peak of $4.1 billion in 2022, as the world emerged from the coronavirus pandemic.
During the same Christie's auction, 86-year-old Ed Ruscha's famous 1964 painting of a gas station titled was sold for $68.26 million, setting a new auction record for the American artist. | BGNES
