The first major consignment of the fall 2024 auction season was just announced: Rene Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954) will be sold at Christie’s, New York this November in a single-source sale of property from the estate of Mica Ertegun. Christie’s estimate for the Magritte is “in excess of $95 million.”
A sale at such a price would far surprass Magritte’s previous auction record of $79.3 million (US) for a closely-related 1961 painting of the same title sold at Sotheby’s London in March 2022. A price of $95 million+ would also set a new record for any work of Surrealist art, a sub-sector that has had considerable market traction in recent years.
Of significant note is the fact that this pre-sale estimate is nearly double the highest realized auction price in the relatively quiet auction season of spring 2024, namely $46.5 million for Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR) (1982) at Phillips, New York, followed closely by the sale of another Magritte, L’ami Intime for $43 million at Christie’s, London.
Despite reported private sales at the highest echelons of the market, and notwithstanding the partially circumstantial nature of certain major estate consignments, the lack of auction consignments of works in the nine figures (or approaching it) spelled total declines in year-to-year sales results — and consequent skepticism among some. Sales figures were woven together with true stories of decline in other market segments, such as markets for emerging art, many of which contracted following a speculative bubble.
The Magritte consignment approaches the value level of the five highest paintings in the Paul Allen sale, and it has the potential to be the first work of art to sell at auction for over $100 million since the sale of Picasso’s Femme à la montre fetched $139.3 million at Sotheby’s, New York in November 2023.
In Artnet’s recently published mid-year market report, Phillip Hoffman, CEO the Fine Art Group stated: “If a big estate came up, and it was of the quality of Yves Saint Laurent’s or Paul Allen’s, it would do incredibly well, even now.” While the Ertegun estate, in totality, is not the same as the Allen estate, this Magritte, which had no equivalent in the spring auctions, will indeed be a test of demand at the high end of the market.