A painting by the surrealist artist Rene Magritte has sold for $121.2 million at Christie’s in New York, setting a new record for the artist at auction and becoming the biggest-ticket lot of this year’s New York November sales season.

The success of the painting’s sale was never in doubt: It carried a third party guarantee reported to be $95 million. In other words, someone effectively bought the painting for $95 million in advance of the sale, with the understanding that they would receive an undisclosed percentage of the upside if bidding went above that sum.

Magritte’s previous auction record was set at Sotheby’s in London in March, 2022, when another, smaller painting from the same L’empire des lumières series sold for about $79.5 million.

“He did 17 oil paintings of L’empire des lumières over 16 years,” says the dealer Daniella Luxembourg, whose gallery is mounting a major Magritte show this spring. “Together with (his dealer) Alexander Iolas, they were very successful in placing major works in museums.”

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Museums that own pieces from the series include the MoMA and Guggenheim. “If somebody wants a recognizable Magritte of great importance that also exists in the biggest museums in the world,” Luxembourg says, “That's the one.”

The painting was sold as part of a standalone sale of art from the estate of the late interior designer and socialite Mica Ertegun, who died last December at the age of 97. 

Ertegun, who was married to Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, compiled their collection over the course of several decades. They purchased the Magritte in 1968, and hung it in their Manhattan townhouse. It was photographed in multiple features on the home over the years, the first of which was in 1969, in Vogue, per the auction house.

The sale comes at a moment when works by surrealist artists are regularly setting records. On Monday night, Sotheby’s kicked off the auction week with a sale of modern artworks, where a sculpture by Leonora Carrington, La Grande Dame, sold for $11.4 million, the most valuable sculpture by the artist to ever sell at auction. 

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“People are more aware of surrealism lately”, says Luxembourg. “They’re more aware of things that happened in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, that were not as expensive as before, but also were terribly important from a cultural and historical point of view.”