New York auction records expected for a Magritte and a banana

NEW YORK - With a Magritte painting estimat­ed to sell for nearly $100 million, drawings by pop artist Keith Har­ing and...

a rather gnarly banana, New York’s auction houses will try this week to shake up a stale market. The sale of Magritte’s “Empire of Light” (“L’Empire des lumieres”), which will go under the hammer Tuesday night at Christie’s, will surely be one of the high points of the autumn season, which will see hundreds of works sold and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. The seminal 1954 work is one of a series of paint­ings from the Surrealist mas­ter depicting the interplay of shadow and light.



Its estimat­ed price is $95 million, which would easily shatter the previ­ous record for a Magritte, $79 million in 2022. Christie’s is hoping that with the Magritte and a celebrated 1964 painting of a gas station by the 86-year-old American pop artist Ed Ruscha, it can reinvigorate an art market that has slowed since 2023. The auction house -- which is controlled by Arte­mis, the investment holding company owned by the Pinault family said sales totalled $2.

1 bil­lion in the first half of 2024. That is down for the second straight year, after a peak of $4.1 billion in 2022, as the world emerged from the coronavirus pandemic.

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