Overview

• Sotheby’s Paris will auction La Magie Noire (1934) on October 24 as the lead lot in its “Surrealism and Its Legacy” sale.
• The work has remained in the same private collection for nearly a century after being acquired directly from Magritte by the Spaak family in 1934.
• Sotheby’s gave the painting a high estimate of €7 million (about $8.1 million), with reporting that it is expected to sell for more than $8 million.
• Magritte’s wife, Georgette Berger, is depicted as a nude whose upper body dissolves into a seascape, an early iteration of a motif the artist revisited in a series of ten portraits.
• Provenance highlights include ties to Suzanne Spaak, a Resistance member executed by the Gestapo and later honored as Righteous Among the Nations, whose family acted as early benefactors to Magritte during financially difficult years.