In 2018, a painting by Magritte, “The Pleasure Principle” had been awarded for 26.8 million dollars up for auction in New York. “L’Empire des lumières” was estimated by Sotheby’s at more than $60 million.
It is one of his most famous works. The painting was painted in 1961 for Magritte’s friend and muse, Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet., daughter of Belgian collector Pierre Crowet. She since then she remained in the family.
The painting shows a house in Brussels at nightilluminated by a lamp stand and the light coming through the windows from the interior, 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 Magritte’s disconcerting surrealism, where two seemingly incompatible things come together to create a +false reality+,” the auction house said.
This 114.5 by 146 cm painting was exhibited around the world 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 work” and noted that it inspired scenes from the horror film “The Exorcist” released in 1973.
The painting is part of a series of 17 oil paintings that “they constitute 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 at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.