Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1961) made £59,422,000 ($79.8 million) at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening auction. This was the highest price ever paid for a painting in GBP in Europe and it tripled the artist’s record. The paradox at its core, as in all of Magritte’s best work, is the artist probing an inherently magical quality as the opposite of our everyday. ‘I have always felt the greatest interest in night and day, without however having any preference for one or the other,’ noted Magritte. ‘This great personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment.
Claude Monet’s limpid Nympheas (1914–1917) – described by the artist as being ‘the illusion of an endless whole, of a watery surface with no horizon and no shore… made £23,228,500.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for February 16, 2022)