Christie's is hoping that with the Magritte and a celebrated 1964 painting of a gas station by the 86-year-old American pop artist Ed Ruscha, it can reinvigorate an art market that has slowed since 2023
With a Magritte painting estimated to sell for nearly $100 million, drawings by pop artist Keith Haring and... a rather gnarly banana, New York's auction houses will try this week to shake up a stale market.
The sale of Magritte's "Empire of Light" ("L'Empire des lumieres"), which will go under the hammer Tuesday night at Christie's, will surely be one of the high points of the autumn season, which will see hundreds of works sold -- and hundreds of millions of dollars spent.
The seminal 1954 work is one of a series of paintings from the Surrealist master depicting the interplay of shadow and light. Its estimated price is $95 million, which would easily shatter the previous record for a Magritte, $79 million in 2022.
Christie's is hoping that with the Magritte and a celebrated 1964 painting of a gas station by the 86-year-old American pop artist Ed Ruscha, it can reinvigorate an art market that has slowed since 2023.
The auction house—which is controlled by Artemis, the investment holding company owned by the Pinault family—said sales totalled $2.1 billion in the first half of 2024.