The iconic landscape The Empire of Lights (by the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898-1967) was sold on March 2 at Sotheby’s in London for 59.4 million pounds (79.8 million dollars) and set a new record for a work by the master of Surrealism At the same time, it also took the lead as the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe, said a spokesman for the British auction house. The previous record for a Magritte was $ 26,830,500 for the painting. The Pleasure Principle sold by Sotheby’s in New York in 2018. “The Empire of Lights” was painted in 1961 for Baroness Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, the daughter of the artist’s patron, the Belgian collector Pierre Crowet, and has remained in the family collection. The subject may have been inspired by the poem Egret by André Breton, whom Magritte knew well, with the line that opens: If only it was sunny tonight (“If only the sun came out tonight”). The eerie combination of a dark and nocturnal street under a bright blue sky is typical of Magritte’s haunting surrealist imagery. Exhibited all over the world in Brussels, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Seoul, Edinburgh and San Francisco, The Empire of Lights it was recently on loan to the Musée Magritte in Brussels from 2009 to 2020, surrounded by the finest collection of the artist’s paintings in the world.
The novelty of the «series»: paintings that dialogue with themselves
Magritte first began working on a version of this subject in 1948, returning to the idea numerous times over the next decade, carefully reimagining and enriching each new composition. The resulting group of seventeen titled oils The Empire of Lights it constitutes Magritte’s only real attempt to create a “series” within his work. The paintings have evolved over time while continuing to talk to each other, just like Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Nights and Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. The series was an immediate success for both the public and collectors, with the first version purchased by Nelson Rockefeller and specimens now preserved in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Menil Collection in Houston and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels.