Is art history a matter of who you know?

I've been following the ascent of surrealist René Magritte's reputation over the last 48 years.

In 1976, I went to an exhibit of 48 paintings by Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967) at the Rice U. Museum in Houston. Back then, the Rice Museum consisted of a metal Quonset hut-like temporary structure (known on campus as the Art Barn) made out of corrugated galvanized sheet iron. It sat off by itself in the vast parking lot of Rice’s football stadium (a facility so large it hosted Super Bowl V). Here’s a rare photo of the no longer existent Rice Museum, with its tree planted by Andy Warhol.

The majestic Rice Museum (now demolished)

It looked like art thieves armed with can openers could loot the place, but why bother? These were just Magrittes on display.

Not surprisingly, the unprepossessing museum was almost empty.

But what a show!

Today, in contrast, Magritte is one of just 16 artists who has had a painting auctioned for nine digits. From the New York Times:

Magritte, Master of Surrealism, Joins the $100 Million Dollar Club

Move over, Picasso, van Gogh and Warhol. With an inscrutable painting, the Belgian painter breaks a nine-figure threshold at Christie’s fall auction.

By Scott Reyburn
Nov. 19, 2024
Updated 10:20 p.m. ET

The Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte has become the latest member of that exclusive club of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million at auction.

On Tuesday night at Christie’s in Manhattan, a version of Magritte’s famously enigmatic subject, “The Empire of Light,” depicting a deserted nocturnal street below a bright daytime sky, sold for $121.2 million with fees…

… The price was the highest yet paid for a Surrealist work of art at auction, and made Magritte the 16th artist to break the $100 million threshold, according to data compiled by the French market analyst company Artprice.

Fellow nine-figure heavyweights include Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (whose paintings have sold for more than $100 million at no fewer than six auctions).

To date, no living artist has achieved this price level at auction.

Painted in 1954 and measuring almost five-feet-high, “The Empire of Light” was the last of 19 works that Christie’s offered from the collection of the socialite, designer and philanthropist Mica Ertegun.

The widow of record producer Ahmet Ertegun.

It was one of the largest of the 17 versions of this subject that Magritte painted in oil.

It seems weird to spend that much money for just one of 17 variants of the same painting. I feel like that for $121,000,000, you ought to get to burn Magritte’s other 16 “Empire of Light” paintings, or, if you are not into carbon emissions, pour maple syrup on them while ranting about climate change or whatever.

… “It’s maybe the best,” said Paolo Vedovi, the director of a gallery in Brussels specializing in works by Magritte and other 20th-century artists. “It seems that every big collector now wants a Magritte.”

Back in 1976, Magritte had a marginal reputation in the art world, a little like Norman Rockwell’s, weirdly enough. Was Magritte really a painter who deserved to be displayed in marble museums, or was he more of a commercial illustrator?

Sure, his images were popular, especially among upscale graphic artists. If Rockwell’s illustrations made perfect sense to the mass audience, Magritte’s made perfect nonsense to cultured people who got the joke of surrealism. For example, his 1928 painting “The False Mirror”

obviously inspired the 1951 CBS logo:

And “The Empire of Light” inspired the the cover of Jackson Browne’s most famous album, 1974’s Late for the Sky.

But Magritte’s days being displayed in a Quonset hut were coming to an end. In 1993, in contrast, I attended the mighty Art Institute of Chicago’s wildly popular Magritte exhibit. Here was my toddler’s favorite Magritte from that show, “The Listening Room:”

I also went to a lecture by the curator who had organized the exhibit. She emphasized that while Magritte had long been put down as merely some work-a-day illustrator in boring bourgeois Brussels, new research had revealed that Magritte had actually spent three formative years in Paris, going to all the fashionable Left Bank cafes where the important Parisian painters hung out. This discovery had allowed Magritte to take a place in the mainstream history of art.

After the lecture, I mentioned to the art scholar how much more prestigious Magritte had gotten since his exhibit 17 years before in the football stadium parking lot.

I asked if, because Magritte had since then ascended into the stratosphere of art history, might we see the same thing happen someday to M. C. Escher, when the computer nerds who like him now are old, rich, and endowing museums.

At the name “Escher,” the curator shuddered slightly. She explained that while Magritte and Escher might seem superficially similar, new research had shown that Magritte had gone out drinking with many famous painters during his three years in Paris. “I don’t want to make art sound like it’s all a matter of who you know, but …” and then she kind of ground to a halt because she was making art sound like it’s all a matter of who you know.

But in the years since, I’ve come to sympathize with her who-you-know approach to art history. Any kind of narrative of art history has to largely comprise an account of who influenced whom. It’s better if art prestige is determined by the views of other artists rather than by the views of critics.

And if, before electronic media, you wanted to someday be a who who influences other artists in a fast-changing art landscape, you need to be an early whom, the kind that Henri or Pablo invite up to their studios after a night of hard drinking to see this new direction they are working on. If you are stuck in Brussels and don’t hear about Henri or Pablo’s breakthrough until it’s in all the magazines, well, lotsa luck with your career.

In other art news, the high price for Magritte suggests that Trump has helped bring Keynes’ animal spirits back to the long-slumping art market.

For example, an Andy Warhol painting of Trump Tower that Warhol did on spec in the hope (unfulfilled) of getting a big commission from Trump sold for $952,000 almost twice its expected price of $500,000.