Surrealist artist René Magritte’s work “L’Empire des lumières” (The Empire of Lights), which shows a house in the dark illuminated by artificial light while the sky is light blue, was sold for almost 80 million dollars at auction, which means a record for the work of the Belgian painter.
The power of this painting lies in the disconcerting play of light that the work combines, where “two apparently incompatible things are associated to create a false reality,” says the auction house, as reported by the AFP news agency. The painting even inspired scenes from the horror film “The Exorcist”, released in 1973, and from the movie’s poster in which points of contact with Magritte’s surreal touches are seen.
The artist painted “The Empire of Lights” in 1961 for his friend, Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, daughter of the Belgian collector Pierre Crowet, and since then the work has remained in the family, which although he had not sold it so far, he did give it up. for exhibitions all over the world for many years.
The work is also part of a series of 17 oil works, which circulates in different collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and in the royal museums of Fine Arts. arts of Belgium in Brussels.
