“The group of seventeen oil paintings, entitled ‘L’ empire des lumières’, is Magritte’s only real attempt to create a ‘series’ within his oeuvre. The works evolved over time, but continued to speak to each other, just like the starry nights by Vincent van Gogh and the water lilies by Claude Monet,” Sotheby’s said. The paintings depict a Brussels house, near the Josaphat Park. The series was an immediate hit with the public and collectors.
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The work has already been exhibited in Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Edinburgh, Seoul and San Francisco. From 2009 to 2020 it was loaned to the Musée Magritte Museum in Brussels. Sotheby’s calls this painting “the most cinematic” of Magritte’s oeuvre. As a testament to its striking power, the work even provided inspiration for a scene in the 1973 Golden Globe-winning classic ‘The Exorcist’.
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Magritte made the painting in 1961 at the request of Baroness Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet. The painting goes up for auction in Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, which covers more than a century of art movements with works from the Impressionists across Surrealism to Pop Art.
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Prior to the auction, the work was on display at Sotheby’s galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong and London.
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