A portray by René Magritte shattered an public sale document for the surrealist artist on Tuesday, promoting for greater than $121m at Christie’s in New York.
The seminal 1954 portray had been valued at $95m, and the earlier document for a piece by Magritte was $79m, set in 2022.
After an almost 10-minute bidding battle on Tuesday, Empire of Gentle (L’Empire des lumieres) was offered for $121,160,000, “reaching a world-record value for the artist and for a surrealist murals at public sale”, in accordance with public sale home Christie’s.
The portray – depicting a home at night time, illuminated by a lamp-post whereas beneath a brilliant blue sky – is certainly one of a collection by the Belgian artist exhibiting the interaction of shadow and lightweight.
Empire of Gentle was a part of the non-public assortment of Mica Ertegun, an inside designer who fled communist Romania to settle in the USA, the place she turned an influential determine within the artwork world.
She was married to Ahmet Ertegun, the music magnate who based the Atlantic Data label, and died in late 2023.
The sale of the Magritte portray was an anticipated spotlight of this week’s autumn gross sales season in New York, at a time when the artwork market has seen a slowdown since final yr.
Christie’s – which is managed by Artemis, the funding holding firm owned by the Pinault household – stated gross sales totaled $2.1bn within the first half of this yr.
That’s down for the second straight yr, after a peak of $4.1bn in 2022 because the world emerged from the coronavirus pandemic.
Throughout the identical Christie’s public sale on Tuesday, a celebrated 1964 portray of a fuel station by Ed Ruscha, titled Commonplace Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, offered for $68.26m, setting a brand new public sale document for the 86-year-old American pop artist.
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