A René Magritte painting that has been in the same private collection for almost a century will make its auction debut at Sotheby’s Paris on October 24. Titled La Magie Noire (1934), it will lead the “Surrealism and Its Legacy” sale and carries a high estimate of €7 million ($8.1 million).
Described as one of Magritte’s “most legendary works” by the house, the nude was acquired directly from the artist by the family of the World War II resistance heroine Suzanne Spaak (she was executed by the Gestapo for helping Jewish children escape the Nazis). The Spaaks were Magritte’s benefactors when he was struggling financially having failed to sell a single work in two years.
“Few images in modern art capture the essence of the surreal as powerfully as this painting,” Thomas Bompard, vice-president of Sotheby’s France, said in a statement. “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.”
Magritte’s wife, Georgette Berger, is the subject of the oil painting. She is portrayed as a statue, resting her right hand on a block of stone, while the top half of her body blends into the backdrop: a view of the sea (a wood-panelled interior makes up part of the background). A white dove sits on her shoulder. The work is the first of ten portraits that the artist painted in which “the female body is metamorphosed into sky, stone, and spirit,” Sotheby’s said. Magritte wrote in a letter to the French writer and poet André Breton that “to transform a woman’s flesh into sky [is] an act of black magic.”
“Though the artist would return to this theme throughout his career, this first iteration stands apart for its purity and poetic force,” the house added.
Suzanne Spaak’s sister, Alice Lorge, purchased La Magie Noire in 1934 to celebrate the birth of her first child with Belgian industrialist Emile Happe. Spaak’s husband was a celebrated Belgian playwright called Claude who knew Magritte and commissioned portraits of his family. He also sorted a monthly stipend for the artist, which was a trusting move at the time because very few people were interested in surrealist work.
Suzanne and Claude were living in Paris when World War II broke out in 1939. Following the Nazi occupation of the city, Suzanne joined the French Resistance, becoming a member of the “Red Orchestra” intelligence network. Using her wealth and resources, she helped save 163 Jewish children from deportation, hiding some in her own home until they could be safely relocated. In October 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis along with 600 other members of the Red Orchestra. On August 12, 1944, just days before Paris was liberated, she was executed by the Gestapo in her prison cell. She was 38 years old. In recognition of her bravery and sacrifice, she was later honored by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Claude’s artistic intuition proved to be correct, surrealism became a major movement, and last year celebrated the centennial of its birth. Major shows were put on at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, among other museums, while auction prices for Surrealist artists have soared recently. In 2024, Christie’s sold Magritte’s L’empire des lumiéres (1954) for $121.2 million in New York, a record for the painter at auction.
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