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‘The Empire of Lights’, by René Magritte, has been sold today at an auction held in the room Sotheby’s of London for 59.4 million pounds (almost 80 million dollars), a new record for a work by the Belgian surrealist artist and the most expensive work ever auctioned in Europe.
It is one of his most famous works. The painting was painted in 1961 for the friend and muse of the Belgian artist Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, daughter of collector Pierre Crowet. She since then she remained in the family. She shows a house in Brussels at night, illuminated by a lantern and the light coming through the windows from inside, while a clear blue sky with clouds seems to indicate that it is daytime.
“The strange combination of a gloomy street, the night, under a blue sky, is typical of the puzzling surrealism of Magritte, where two apparently incompatible things are associated to create a false reality«, they point out from the auction house. The painting, 114.5 by 146 centimeters, has been exhibited in Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Seoul, Edinburgh and San Francisco, and was loaned to the Magritte Museum in Brussels from 2009 to 2020.
Sotheby’s considers this painting to be “undoubtedly the most cinematic of all Magritte’s oeuvre«: it inspired scenes of ‘The Exorcist’. It is part of a series of 17 oil paintings that “represent Magritte’s only true attempt to create a series in his work,” Sotheby’s said. This series was an immediate success with the public and collectors, with an early version purchased by Nelson Rockefeller and examples held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
