'Dominion of Light' painting sells for £59.4m at auction

[LONDON] Rene Magritte's paradoxical painting L'Empire des Lumieres (Dominion of Light) sold for a hammer price of £51.5 million (S$93.7 million) on Wednesday (Mar 2), setting a new record auction price for the surrealist Belgian artist.

Additional fees gave it a final sale price of £59.4 million.

Depicting a night-time Brussels street under a bright blue sky, the 1961 Dominion of Light had an estimate in excess of more than £45 million. Auction house Sotheby's called it "a masterpiece of 20th-century art".

The painting is one in a series of 17 similar oils and 10 other works depicting the scene that Magritte produced from the 1940s to the 1960s.

The one sold on Wednesday was painted for Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, a friend of Magritte and the daughter of his patron, the Belgian collector Pierre Crowet. It has remained in the family's hands ever since.

On the darkened street are silhouettes of trees and a house with light glowing from windows and a street lamp. Above the sky is blue with white clouds.

The image was the inspiration for the cover of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne's 1974 album Late for the Sky and a scene in The Exorcist; that movie's poster pay homage to it.

Other lots on offer at Wednesday's auction were 4 works by Claude Monet, painted in the 1880s to 1890s as he moved away from impressionism. The top lot, a depiction of a cluster of chrysanthemums inspired by the Japanese print maker Hokusai, fetched £8.3 million.

A fifth painting of water lilies produced in the 1910s sold for £23.2 million.

Works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney were also offered at the auction. REUTERS