A painting by Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte has sold for $18.14 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York.
Created in 1955, The Banquet was initially estimated to fetch between $15 million and $20 million at the Sotheby's auction on Wednesday. The painting depicts depicts a forest pierced by a brilliant red sun and the 75.5-by-121-centimeter piece has been part of an influential American private collection since November 2017.
Sotheby's described the oil painting as "a beautiful example of René Magritte's ability to visually shape the space between sight and our experience of the world."
Two versions of Magritte's The Happy Hand, both from a European collection, also found new owners at the auction. Each versions feature a piano enclosed in an engagement ring. The first, created in 1952, sold for $1.27 million while the second (a larger version of the same painting from 1953) sold for $4.02 million.
'The Banquet' (1955), René Magritte. Credit: Sotheby's
All three paintings featured in a round of auctioning titled Modern Evening which included around 50 other works by prominent artists such as Claude Monet, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso. Monet's 'Haystacks at Giverny' (1893) sold for $34.8 million on the same day, after eight minutes of intense bidding.
British-Mexican Leonora Carrington broke a record when the artist's Dagobert's Diversions sold for $28.5 million after a ten-minute bidding battle. According to Sotheby's, the sale "positions Carrington among the top five highest-rated female artists, ahead of male surrealists such as Max Ernst or Salvador Dali."
Global art sales have experienced a sharp decline in the past few years, according to a Bank of America study which revealed that average auction prices decreased by 32% in 2023, the largest one-year drop in over seven years.
