A painting by René Magritte, L’empire des Lumières (1961) set a record for the highest price ever paid for a painting in GBP in Europe, as well as tripling the artist’s record, when it sold for £59,422,000 ($79.8 million) at Sotheby’s London. The Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on March 2nd saw some remarkable sales successes, with the combined sales total soaring to £221.4 / $297.2 million, the highest total ever achieved in a single...
A painting by the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932), set a new auction record for the Polish-American artist’s work, selling for £16.2 million ($21.1 million) at Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and modern art in London this week. This beat her previous record, set only three months ago, when La Tunique Rose (1927) sold for $13.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (seen top of...
On 27 February 2019, Christie’s auction house will offer Le Lieu Commun (1964), one of the iconic ‘bowler hat’ Magritte masterpieces. Leading The Art of the Surreal sale, the painting is estimated to fetch between £15-25 million and is expected to set a new world auction record for the artist. This is the first time the work of art—which is considered to be one of the finest and largest examples of René Magritte’s bowler hat...
As the exhibition, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, opened at its third and final venue, the Art Institute of Chicago (June 24, 2014–October 13, 2014), Charles Ford (Arts & Collections) talked to Allen Blevins, Director of Art & Heritage Programs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, about the Bank’s involvement with the Magritte exhibition and about the Bank’s wider challenges and objectives through its global art sponsorship and conservation programs. AB: I had the opportunity of...
With the shock of the new very much in evidence in the first decades of the twentieth century, René Magritte’s art was unique in depicting the mystery of the ordinary. Do you see what I see? How our brains interpret what we see can vary from one individual to another. The ambiguity of seeing has fascinated artists as far back as the Renaissance, and this puzzling phenomenon again took hold particularly in the first quarter...
