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One of the most desired works of modern art left in private hands, and one of the iconic images of surrealist art, ‘The Empire of Lights’, by René Magritte, will go up for auction in the room Sotheby’s from London on March 2nd with an estimate greater than $ 60 million. Created in 1961 for Baroness Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, daughter of Magritte’s patron, the Belgian collector of surrealist art Pierre Crowet, it has remained in the family ever since. Anne Marie she embodied Magritte’s aesthetic ideal, even before he met her. She became great friends with the artist and his wife, Georgette.
The famous painting It has been exhibited all over the world (Brussels, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Seoul, Edinburgh, San Francisco …). loaned to the Magritte Museum in Brussels from 2009 to 2020, where he was surrounded by the best collection of Magritte paintings in the world.
Before the auction, the painting will be on public display at Sotheby’s galleries in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, New York and London.
Magritte’s first encounter with Anne-Marie, when he recognized her as the embodiment of the musa that already inhabited her imagination, took place when she was 16 years old and she was asked to paint her portrait. In the years that followed, his face continued to appear in many of his major paintings. Since they met, the couple formed a close bond. Anne-Marie played chess with the artist at his home and spent the followingnoons with the family watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films. Along with her husband, Roland, Anne-Marie is a key figure on the Belgian cultural scene: her Art Nouveau collection was donated to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (where it occupies an entire floor).
Magritte first began work on a version of this theme in 1948, returning to the idea numerous times over the next decade, carefully reinventing and enriching each new composition. The resulting group of seventeen oils entitled ‘The Empire of Lights’ constitutes Magritte’s only real attempt to create a ‘series’ within his work. The works evolved over time without stopping talking to each other, in the same way that the starry nights of Vincent van Gogh and the water lilies of Claude Monet. The series was an immediate hit with the public and collectors. The first version was bought by Nelson Rockefeller and some paintings in the series are in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the MoMA in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
The work up for auction is one of the largest in the series: it measures 114.5 by 146 centimeters. The subject may have been inspired by the poem ‘L’Aigrette’ by André Breton, which Magritte knew well: ‘Si seulement il faisait du soleil cette nuit’ (‘If only the sun would rise tonight’). The strange combination of a dark and night street under a bright blue sky is typical of Magritte’s haunting surreal imagery. It represents a quiet street near the Josaphat Park in Brussels, where the artist had moved in 1954.
Surrealist art and cinema were closely linked, and this majestic image is possibly the most cinematic of all of Magritte’s work. Testimony to its captivating power, the play even provided inspiration for a scene from the horror classic. ‘The Exorcist’, winner of the 1973 Golden Globe.
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