Edward Hopper: “Chop Suey” (1929)
Estimate in the region of $70 million.
The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection at Christie’s Christie’s will auction The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, a singular assemblage of over 85 artworks that illuminates the rise of American art across the 20th century. Highlights of the collection include Edward Hopper’s ‘Chop Suey’, 1929, Jackson Pollock’s ‘Composition with Red Strokes’, and Willem de Kooning’s ‘Woman as Landscape’.]]>
September 8, 2018, source: Christie’s
A seminal composition within the landscape of American Modernism, Edward Hopper’s “Chop Suey” was one of Mr. Ebsworth’s most prized possessions (estimate in the region of $70 million). Possibly derived from a Cantonese phrase, tsap sui, meaning ‘odds and ends,’ chop suey referred not only to a low-cost stir-fry dish but, moreover, to a public destination where the societal fusion of different cultural elements of the modern city came together. As in his masterwork “Nighthawks” (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois), Hopper’s 1929 painting “Chop Suey” distills the atmosphere of this everyday eatery into a cinematic scene that at once depicts an implicit narrative while creating clear allusions to broader themes of social isolation, gender roles and art historical tradition.
Willem de Kooning’s “Woman as Landscape” is a tour-de-force of 20th century painting (estimate in the region of $60 million). Executed at the height of the artist’s career in 1955, this large-scale canvas belongs to a small group of works that are well positioned among the most powerful paintings in American art. Measuring over five and a half feet tall, Woman as Landscape is a heroic painting that encompasses the painterly bravado and radical use of color that singled out de Kooning as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and one of the pre-eminent painters of his generation.
Jackson Pollock’s “Composition with Red Strokes” was executed in 1950 during the peak of his extraordinary creative output and is a central work to the artist’s oeuvre, demonstrating his new technique (estimate in the region of $50 million). It was these startling, original and accomplished paintings that, in Willem de Kooning’s phrase, finally ‘broke the ice’ for American painting, completely revolutionizing it and in the process reshaping the entire history of 20th century art.
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Hopper and Bellows lead Sotheby’s auction, May 2012 (news, 2012)
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