American ClassicsHopper, Rockwell and Wyeth Establish New Auction Records at Sotheby's November 29th Sale of American Paintings BY RENEE HARRISON DRAKE The American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture sale on November 29th at Sotheby's proved that collectors are still willing to pay top prices for iconic works by artists like Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. Existing sales records for these three artists were broken in the crowded salesroom when Hopper's Hotel Window, Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties and N.C. Wyeth's Stand and Deliver all soared well above their pre-sale estimates when offered to collectors in New York. The highest selling lot, Hopper's Hotel Window, was hammered down for $26,896,000, a price far exceeding the previous record for his South Truro Church that sold in 1990 for $2,420,000. The painting is a classic example of the artist's exploration of urban isolation in America. Hopper acknowledged that the subject was an improvisation of hotel scenes he had witnessed in his walks through the Thirties from Broadway to Fifth Avenue in New York. According to Dara Mitchell, director of Sotheby's American Paintings Department, "Hopper's bold, realist style and distilled compositional format reinforce the psychological power of Hotel Window and have close connections to many elements of film noir. Self-imposed solitude, the result of the individual's disappointment in human interaction, was a societal ill that defined the American experience as depicted by both Hopper and the auteurs of contemporary fiction and film." Formerly in the Thyssen Bornemisza Collection, Hotel Window was sold in 1987 to Malcom Forbes. In addition to its excellent provenance, the painting had been widely exhibited in America and abroad. Norman Rockwell's Breaking Ties was discovered early in 2006 behind a wall in the Vermont home of noted cartoonist Don Trachte. Trachte had purchased the painting directly from the artist in 1960 and had later made a replica of the painting. That replica had been exhibited in museum shows and was believed to be the original until the recent discovery of the original was found in a secret hiding place in Trachte's home. The painting first became known to Americans when it appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post's September issue of 1954. The painting depicts a Depression-era rancher waiting for a train with his son who is going off to college, and it underscores the generation gap in families of post-World War II America. Estimated to fetch between $4 and $6 million dollars, the painting exceeded those expectations when it was hammered down for $15,416,000, breaking the previous record for Rockwell of $9,200,000 established in May of 2006 and setting a new auction record for the artist. The swarthy pirates depicted in N.C. Wyeth's Stand and Deliver appeared on the cover of Life Magazine's September 1921 issue. Like his teacher Howard Pyle, Wyeth frequently painted pirates which were a popular subject during America's Golden Age of Illustration. Paintings of these intimidating buccaneers were often included in his illustrations for Scribner's illustrated classics, most notably in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. As most of the dynamic pirate paintings N.C. Wyeth executed remain in the hands of his family or on exhibition at The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, it is rare to have one appear at auction. Estimated to achieve between $1 and $1.5 million, Stand and Deliver was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $2,032,000. This price is the first for the artist to break the million-dollar barrier, well above the previous record of $896,000 for the artist at auction.
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