With Rene Magritte’s L'empire des lumières (1954) guaranteed to sell this week at Christie’s in the region of $95 million, it was a foregone conclusion that the high end of the November Evening Sales would be markedly different from May, when the the three big houses were led by the sale of Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR) at Phillips for a comparatively low $46.5 million.

The Magritte flew last night, fetching, with buyer’s premium $121.1 million, over $40 million above the artist’s previous auction record, set at Sotheby’s in 2022 for a painting of a similar subject. The price, among the highest realized at auction for a postwar painting, is still not remarkable in absolute terms; in the past decade we’ve become accustomed to nine-figure results for major works.

However, at a moment of correction in many market sectors, the strength of the Magritte sale suggests that the market for masterpieces may operate by its own logic and largely apart from trends seen elsewhere in the market.

If one were to wonder how the five $100+ million lots in the November 2022 Paul Allen auction would fare in today’s market, the Magritte sale may point to an answer. The Magritte’s realized price of $121.1 million is squarely within the range of the highest prices in Allen; more specifically, it would have been the third-highest sale in that auction, after Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire ($137.8 million) and slightly above Van Gogh’s Verger aves cyprès ($117.2 million). One might even extrapolate from the strength of demand for the Magritte that the paucity of highest-end consignments in recent auctions appears largely to be a supply-side matter.

Also selling this week for more than the above-mentioned $46.5 million Basquiat were Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) for a record-setting $68,250,000, offered by Christie’s sans guarantee with an estimate in the region of $50 million, and Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1914-17) for $65.5 million at Sotheby’s.