“Empire of Lights”, an iconic painting by René Magritte, sold at auction in New York on Tuesday night for $121 million, a record for the Belgian artist, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of his “birth”. surrealist movement in art.

After ten minutes of bidding on Rockefeller Centerwhere the Christie’s auction was held, the work sold for $121,160,000 (including commission and taxes). It is the largest sum ever paid for a surrealist painting. “Empire of Lights” also became the 11th most expensive painting in the history of public auctions, according to AFP data.

The painting is part of a series of eponymous works by the Belgian painter (1898-1967) that present the play of shadow and light. It depicts a paradoxical landscape: a house at night, lit only by a lantern, under a deep blue sky.

“Empire of Lights” is a topic that excites Magritte fans since four of the five paintings by the painter that have sold more than $30 million at auction were part of this series. One of them also held the previous record (79 million, in 2022) for a Magritte work.

The painting inspired, among others, the American director William Friedkin for the famous 1973 horror film The Exorcist. It belonged to the private collection of Mika Ertegun, an interior designer who fled communist Romania and settled in the US where she became an important patron of the art world. Ertegun died at the end of 2023 at the age of 97. She was also the wife of Ahmet Ertegun, the music industry mogul, founder of Atlantic Records.

At the same auction, an Ed Russa painting, “The Standard Gas Station, a Ten Cent Western Torn in Half,” sold for $68.26 million, a record for a work by this American living pop artist. It is the second-highest sum ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist, behind Britain’s David Hockney’s “Portrait of the Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which sold in 2018 for $90 million.