Christie’s has announced Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half will lead the 20th Century Evening Sale during Fall Marquee Week this November (estimate on request; in excess of $50 million). One of the outstanding paintings of post-war art and the last of Ruscha’s large-scale 1960s masterpieces in private hands, it comes to auction after featuring as one of the centerpieces of the artist’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2023-24.
Max Carter, Christie’s Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, remarks, “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half represents the synthesis and peak of Ruscha’s masterpieces of the early 1960s. It is an icon—of Ruscha’s art, of paradox, of the post-war era. Offering it this fall at Christie’s is once-in-a-lifetime.”
Ed Ruscha first encountered the Standard Oil gas stations during a road trip from his native Oklahoma to Los Angeles along Route 66 in 1962. Captivated by the boldness of their design against the vastness of American landscape, he began including them into what would become many of his most famous paintings. Just as Andy Warhol did with soup cans, Ruscha immortalized the gas station through seriality. The image has now become emblematic of the American West and the post-war art historical canon, memorialized in 1963 in Ruscha’s now legendary publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half stands as an icon among this celebrated series. The work debuted the year it was created in a 1964 exhibition in Los Angeles’s famed Ferus Gallery, where it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Factor of Los Angeles. It has since remained privately held within esteemed collections, while simultaneously shared extensively. The painting has been cited throughout literature and exhibited publicly at leading institutions including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institute, The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and most recently The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its sister painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963 is held in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.
On the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Christie’s has announced three seminal works highlighting Fall Marquee Week, each of which played a critical role in underpinning the development, evolution, and overarching narrative of the Surrealist movement through the course of the 20th century. The three works —Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915/1964) René Magritte’s Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (1928) and Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1956) — represent the finest examples of sculpture, painting, and works on paper, and hail from distinctly separate periods within the movement’s history and prehistory. All three will be featured highlights in the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place in New York on November 19, 2024 at Christie's Rockefeller Center.
Olivier Camu, Christie’s Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, remarks, “Christie's has long championed the pioneering artists of the Surrealist movement and we are honored to have offered a wide breadth of their finest examples through a dedicated evening sale, The Art of the Surreal, for more than two decades. Today, we continue to celebrate the movement's enduring relevance. The sale of Magritte’s monumental L’empire des lumières from the Mica Ertegun Collection, arguably the best available large composition of this kind remaining in private hands, is estimated at over $95 million, and set to establish a new benchmark, further cementing Surrealism's lasting impact on the history of the art market.”
Max Carter, Christie’s Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, remarks, “In October 1924, André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto. To mark the 100th anniversary, we are honored to announce three emblems of Surrealist history and its influences from across 40 years: the first of Duchamp’s inner circle readymades to appear at auction in recent memory, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), which comes to Christie’s from the family of Joseph Kosuth; one of the last of Magritte’s seminal masterpieces in private hands, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (1928), which nearly eclipsed the artist’s record when the present owner acquired it at Christie’s in 2014; and L’empire des lumières (1956), the biggest and best of the motif in gouache and unseen since 1981. With this trio alongside Mica Ertegun’s extraordinary collection and iconic Magritte, it does not get any better.”
The earliest of the works, In Advance of the Broken Arm (estimate: $2 – 3 million) dates to the winter of 1915 when Marcel Duchamp, having just relocated from Europe to New York, encountered snow shovels for the first time, piled up outside of a hardware store near his studio. Intrigued by their form, he purchased a single shovel and titled, signed and dated it on the handle. He then hung it with a piece of wire from the ceiling of his studio, transforming it from a utilitarian object into a sculptural artwork. This revolutionary act marked an important moment in Duchamp’s career, and In Advance of the Broken Arm became one of the earliest of the artist’s iconic and profoundly influential Readymades. Duchamp’s Readymades became more fully ingrained within the public consciousness two years later with the exhibition of his notorious Fountain in 1917, which ushered in an entirely new era and an understanding that objecthood can be divorced from function, purpose and surroundings through a process of conceptual sublimation and a shift in perception. This laid new groundwork for artistic thought and innovation, effectively altering the course of art history and in part, contributing to the foundational principles of what would become Surrealism. The present version of In Advance of the Broken Arm comes from the private collection of the conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth. For Kosuth, Duchamp served as one of his earliest and most important influences, his subversion of the notion of an artwork underpinning much of Kosuth’s own practice. With works such as One in Three Shovels, which appears to directly reference In Advance of the Broken Arm, Kosuth paid homage to Duchamp as he took the concept of the Readymade to a new level.
Magritte’s 1928 work, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (estimate: $8 – 12 million), was painted just one year after the young artist relocated from Brussels to Paris in order to be closer to then-nascent Surrealist group. He quickly developed friendships with the group’s key members, including Paul Eluard and André Breton. This was perhaps the most productive and innovative chapter of the artist’s entire career, as he tapped into a rich seam of ideas inspired by the stimulating environment of Paris and his encounters with his fellow Surrealists. Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit is now considered to be one of Magritte’s early masterpieces of Surrealism. The scene depicts a pair of hunters, struggling to free themselves from two walls that threaten to absorb them, next to a darkly lit open landscape on the right. The atmospheric nature of the work invokes the disquieting poetics of Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Magritte was a devoted reader. A letter from Paul Nougé, delivered at the very beginning of Magritte’s stay in Paris, had used the analogy of a wall to issue a great rallying cry to the artist, encouraging him to challenge the status-quo of art making. “There are those who are anxious to know what goes on behind the wall; there are those who are prepared to settle for the wall; there are those who do not care what happens behind the wall, if anything; there are those who don’t see the wall; there are those who deny the wall; there are those who deny or refuse even the possibility of the wall. But you, mon cher Magritte, you have constructed an infernal machine, you are a good engineer, a conscientious engineer. You have left nothing undone in order to blow up the wall.”
The third and final work of the trio is Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (estimate: $6 – 8 million), a work on paper hailing from the artist’s most iconic and highly coveted series – four of which are among his top ten highest prices at auction. Focusing on the mysterious appearance of a sun-lit sky above a quiet house bathed in the shadows of night, the subject of the 1956 gouache is among the most recognizable images of the Surrealist movement and is poised to surpass the current record for the artist in this medium of $7.4 million established at Christie’s London in February 2023. By including day and night, two normally irreconcilable conditions, simultaneously in this scene, Magritte disrupts the viewer's sense of time and space, transforming this otherwise ordinary landscape into something inherently strange and magical. Executed in dynamic layers of fluid pigment, this richly worked gouache is the most brilliant example from the series on paper, capturing the glow from the singular street-lamp—an important leitmotif within the L’empire des lumières paintings—in a dense pattern of delicate brushstrokes.
In February 2015, The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale in Christie’s London became the first Surrealist sale to surpass $100 million mark. Nearly a decade later, demand for Surrealism is stronger than ever. This November, A monumental painting from Magritte’s L’empire des lumières series will be offered by Christie’s New York in a single-owner sale from The Collection of Mica Ertegun carrying an estimate in excess of $95 million, which will establish a new benchmark for both the Surrealist movement and all of art history.