A painting by René Magritte shattered an auction record for the surrealist artist on Tuesday, selling for more than $121m at Christie’s in New York.

The seminal 1954 painting had been valued at $95m, and the previous record for a work by Magritte was $79m, set in 2022.

After a nearly 10-minute bidding war on Tuesday, Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumieres) was sold for $121,160,000, “achieving a world-record price for the artist and for a surrealist work of art at auction”, according to auction house Christie’s.

The painting – depicting a house at night, illuminated by a lamp-post while under a bright blue sky – is one of a series by the Belgian artist showing the interplay of shadow and light.

Empire of Light was part of the private collection of Mica Ertegun, an interior designer who fled communist Romania to settle in the United States, where she became an influential figure in the art world.

She was married to Ahmet Ertegun, the music magnate who founded the Atlantic Records label, and died in late 2023.

The sale of the Magritte painting was an expected highlight of this week’s autumn sales season in New York, at a time when the art market has seen a slowdown since last year.

Christie’s – which is controlled by Artemis, the investment holding company owned by the Pinault family – said sales totaled $2.1bn in the first half of this year.

That is down for the second straight year, after a peak of $4.1bn in 2022 as the world emerged from the coronavirus pandemic.

During the same Christie’s auction on Tuesday, a celebrated 1964 painting of a gas station by Ed Ruscha, titled Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, sold for $68.26m, setting a new auction record for the 86-year-old American pop artist.