Sotheby’s Paris will present René Magritte’s La Magie Noire (1934) as the headline lot in its “Surrealism and Its Legacy Sale” auction on October 24th. Estimated at €5 million– €7 million ($5.4 million–$7.6 million), the work is set to be the most expensive sold by the auction house in Paris this year.
The painting marks the beginning of Magritte’s celebrated “La Magie Noire” series, a group of 10 works from the 1940s depicting women transforming into elemental forms. Modeled on his wife, Georgette, this particular painting presents a nude figure whose body fades into the pale blue sky, with a pigeon perched on her disappearing shoulder.
“At once an image of strange juxtaposition and unexpected poeticism, La Magie Noire embodies Magritte’s extraordinary ability to transform the familiar into the uncanny,” Thomas Bompard, vice president of Sotheby’s France and co-director of Sotheby’s Paris, said in a statement. “Its visual poetry, extraordinary provenance, and historical resonance remain unmatched, marking the very genesis of one of his most recurring motifs. To encounter this work is to witness the very moment Magritte turned magic into image.”
Magritte painted La Magie Noire shortly after the “Le nu dans l’art vivant” exhibition at Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts, where he showed three works. Organized by members of the Spaak family—who would go on to acquire La Magie Noire—the exhibition featured interpretations of the nude by artists such as Charles Despiau and Pablo Picasso. Magritte was reportedly influenced by French sculptor Aristide Maillol’s classical approach to the subject, prompting him to reimagine the nude through a Surrealist lens.
For 90 years, the painting has remained in the possession of the Spaak family, who were among the earliest supporters of Magritte. Claude Spaak met the artist through E.L.T. Mesens in 1931. In 1935, the family arranged a stipend for first refusal on Magritte’s works. Throughout this time, Magritte painted portraits of Suzanne Spaak and their children, now held in the Musée Magritte in Brussels. The artist also designed the family’s coat of arms.
