The Empire of Light Edition

On René Magritte, Jackson Browne, and albums imitating art.

Louis here. Last month, a Magritte painting—The Empire of Light—sold at auction for over $120 million. It was a world record not just for a Magritte, but for any auctioned work of surrealist art. And it put the Belgian painter in the tiny-nine figure club, which otherwise includes only Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso.

The painting is one of a series of more than twenty Magritte painted, and every one is majestic. They all depict a quiet street at night, except with one beguiling difference: that evening street is, impossibly, under a daytime sky.