The news that the Magritte painting ‘L’Empire des Lumières’ sold at Sotheby’s this week for more than 120 million dollars – the highest sum ever paid for a Surrealist painting – took me back to 1990 when my novel about lucid dreaming, The Empire of Lights, was published.
In particular I found myself recollecting a lunch I had in a London restaurant with my agent Giles Gordon and my editor at Hamish Hamilton, Peter Straus (now the agent for such global literary superstars as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan). At that time I had neither a title nor a cover design for the book and Peter asked me if I had any ideas on these matters. I replied that I’d like, if possible, to use a Magritte painting for the cover art and I described the image to him. He asked what the painting was called and I told him ‘The Empire of Lights’. ‘There’s your title,’ he said. Lux – lucid – light: it worked well, I thought, and the matter was settled.
I’ve been fascinated by this painting ever since first encountering an Americanized version of it (with a Chevy parked outside the house) on the cover of the Jackson Browne album Late for the Sky back in the 1970s. What intrigued me about Magritte’s painting was not just the impossible, dream-like concatenation of night and day – a cerulean sky with fluffy white clouds presiding over a gloomy house sunk in shadow, perhaps representing (or was this too literal an interpretation?) the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind – but the single illuminated light in an upstairs window of the house. Someone, presumably, was inside that room. Who were they and what were they doing? Were they asleep and dreaming? Or perhaps insomniac, unable to sleep? It only belatedly struck me that the lumières of the painting’s title might refer not to the daytime sky but to this bedroom light together with the light from the street lamp outside the house.
Magritte made a whole series of such paintings and even experimented, less successfully, with the opposite effect – a night-time sky above a street bathed in sunshine – which makes it surprising perhaps that a single iteration of the image should fetch such a high price at auction. Speaking personally, I can’t afford 120 million dollars, so for the last 30 years or so a print of the painting – a gift from someone I hold very close – has hung on my bedroom wall instead. It’s the last thing I see before I fall asleep at night and the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.
Did I mention that the painting was created in 1954, the year of my birth?
Robert Grossmith 