Rene Magritte valuation
Bowler hats, pipes that are not pipes, and skies painted with a commercial artist's discipline.
Rene Magritte was born at Lessines in Belgium in 1898; his mother drowned herself when he was thirteen, and he was said to have seen the body recovered with her nightdress over her face, an image the biographers have made much of and which he dismissed.
What a work by Rene Magritte is worth
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Bio
Rene Magritte was born at Lessines in Belgium in 1898; his mother drowned herself when he was thirteen, and he was said to have seen the body recovered with her nightdress over her face, an image the biographers have made much of and which he dismissed. He worked in wallpaper design and advertising, which accounts for the deliberately unremarkable technique, and made the paintings that define him from the late 1920s: the pipe captioned Ceci n'est pas une pipe, men in bowler hats, day and night in one picture, objects at impossible scale. He forged Picassos and Braques during the war to survive, and painted in his dining room in Brussels until his death in 1967.
Magritte repeated his own successful compositions many times over decades, in oil, gouache and drawing, so an image existing in several versions is normal rather than suspicious — but it makes identification against the Sylvester catalogue raisonne essential. He is also very heavily forged. Gouaches are numerous and are the most accessible unique works. The wartime period, the vache paintings of 1948 and the acknowledged forgeries all complicate the record. The Magritte Foundation is the authority on attribution.
At a glance
- Born
- 21 November 1898, Lessines
- Died
- 15 August 1967
- Movement
- Belgian Surrealism
More on Wikipedia.
Original prints and posthumous lithographs
Magritte came to printmaking late. The catalogue raisonné lists only about twenty original prints, all begun or completed in the last years of his life, and they are scarce. Most of the Magritte lithographs on the market are something else: reproductions of his paintings and gouaches made after his death in 1967.
Those posthumous editions are legitimate if they are what they claim to be. Earlier ones were often signed in pencil by his widow, Georgette, beside a signature printed in the image; more recent ones carry blind stamps of the Magritte Foundation and the French copyright society ADAGP. They are valued as authorised reproductions, well below an original print, and a sheet with only a printed signature and no stamp or numbering is usually a poster.
Le Centaure, Paris and the Menil catalogue
Magritte studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918, and in 1922 married Georgette Berger, whom he had first met as a child in 1913. The same year the poet Marcel Lecomte showed him a reproduction of de Chirico's The Song of Love, which moved him to tears. He drew for a wallpaper factory and designed posters until 1926, when a contract with Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels let him paint full time, and The Lost Jockey of that year is his first surrealist picture. After a poorly reviewed first show in Brussels in 1927 he moved to Paris for three years and joined Breton's circle.
Le Centaure closed at the end of 1929. Back in Brussels he and his brother Paul ran an advertising agency, and between 1930 and 1932 he neither exhibited nor sold. He and Georgette lived at 135 rue Esseghem from 1930 to 1954, and the house is now a museum. The Magritte Museum on the Place Royale opened in 2009 with some 200 works, most of them from Georgette's collection and from Irène Hamoir Scutenaire, his main collector. John and Dominique de Menil funded the catalogue raisonné, published in five volumes between 1992 and 1997 with an addendum in 2012.
Best auction results
- L'empire des lumières $121.2m
- Oil on canvas, 1954 · New York · 19 November 2024
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
- L'empire des lumières £59.4m
- Oil on canvas, 1961 · London · 2 March 2022
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record until 2024.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
