Rene Magritte’s painting L’ami Intime, which hasn’t been displayed publicly in 25 years, will be part of The Art of The Surreal Evening Sale auction organized by Christie’s on March 7 in London, UK. The auction house estimates that the artwork, which was completed in 1958, will fetch a price between £30 million ($38 million) and £50 million ($63.3 million).
L’ami Intime shows a bowler-hatted figure, a popular subject in Magritte’s paintings, standing on a balcony and looking at a landscape in front of him. Behind the man’s back, a baguette and a wine glass are floating in the air.
The painting was last auctioned in 1980 and was last exhibited at Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, Belgium, in 1998. Ahead of the auction, L’ami Intime will make rounds around the world and be displayed in New York City and Hong Kong before making its way to London for a pre-sale exhibition.
“L’ami Intime (The Intimate Friend) is one of the most powerful and impressive of only a few of these iconic images left in private hands, a tour de force of the artist’s hyper-realistic technique,” said Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. “Extremely poetic, silent and mysterious, especially given the unknown identity of the sitter together with its evocative title.”