NEW YORK, NY.- Part One of
Christie’s sale of An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection totaled $317,801,250, a vigorous start to the two-day dedicated sale of the travel entrepreneur’s exceptional collection of 20th Century American art. The sale was 88% sold by lot, and 99% sold by value.
Highlights of the collection include Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey, 1929, the most important work by the artist still in private hands, which achieved $91,875,000, a record for the artist and the category of American Art. Willem de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape also set an artist record at $68,937,500, and Jackson Pollock’s Composition with Red Strokes sold for $55,437,500. Additional auction records were achieved for the following artists: Arshile Gorky, John Marin, Joseph Stella, Gaston Lachaise, Tom Otterness, Leon Polk Smith, Suzy Frelinghuysen, George Tooker, David Smith, Francis Criss, Charles Green Shaw, and Patrick Henry Bruce.
A Day sale of 48 additional works from the Collection will be presented on November 14 at Christie’s Rockefeller Center salerooms and online.
After the sale, the Ebsworth family remarked: “We are delighted with the results tonight at Christie’s which paid tribute to my father’s eye and focus on quality. The works that gave him so much pleasure will now do the same for their new owners.”
Marc Porter, Chairman, Christie’s Americas, commented: “Since the launch of this collection at Christie’s Paris in September, we have introduced collectors to the singular brilliance of Barney A. Ebsworth’s collecting vision, which sprung from his early fascination with Gertrude Stein’s Paris and evolved to encompass all strands of American Art – from Abstract Expressionism, to Precisionism, to Magical Realism, to Park Avenue Cubism. He set a new high standard for quality among collections of 20th Century Art, and tonight we saw the marketplace respond with vigor to the artists and artworks that were dear to him, most notably Edward Hopper, and Willem de Kooning.”
The late Mr. Ebsworth was a renowned collector and entrepreneur who was named one of the ‘World's 200 Greatest Collectors’. He founded cruise lines, the Intrav luxury travel business, and was an angel investor in the stuffed-animal phenomenon Build-A-Bear Workshop. Mr. Ebsworth’s passion for art originated during his station with the US Army in France in 1956, when he made weekly trips to the Louvre. When he became a collector in his own right, his credo was “quality, quality, quality,” and with that mindset he amassed the most comprehensive collection of American Modernism in private hands. He housed his collection at home in Seattle, in a custom-built house he designed in collaboration with architect Jim Olson, and named “An American Place” in tribute to the former Alfred Stieglitz gallery of the same name.
In an auction world first, the sale of the Ebsworth Collection marks the first time an art auction at this price level has been recorded on a blockchain. Christie’s and Artory, a leading art-centric technology provider, partnered to create a secure digital registry for the sale of the Ebsworth Collection, in the spirit of the innovation and entrepreneurship that guided Mr. Ebsworth career. The introduction of this technology for this sale continues Christie’s legacy of leading the industry by introducing technology innovations in the context of major collections, for the ultimate benefit of our clients.
