Hopper's Chop Suey in record-breaking $92m sale

Edward Hopper's "Chop Suey", a 1929 oil painting of two women talking closely in a NY restaurant that had always been publicly promised to Seattle Art Museum, instead sold at a Christie's auction Tuesday for $91.9 million.

It was one of 91 modern American art paintings put up for auction by the estate of U.S. entrepreneur Barney Ebsworth, who died in April.

De Kooning's 1955 "Woman as Landscape" sold for $68.9 million, having been valued pre-sale at $60-90 million, and also set a new record at auction for the Dutch-born abstract expressionist, Christie's said.

It eclipsed the $66.3 million paid for his 1977 "Untitled XXV" in November 2016.

The Ebsworth collection was described by Christie's as "representing the rise of American art across the 20th Century", with an array of modern art styles from cubism to pure abstraction.

The collection includes 1929 canvas "Chop Suey" by Edward Hopper, America's most popular modernist. He died in 1967.

Christie's had marketed "Chop Suey" as "the most iconic painting by Hopper left in private hands" and the price tag chalked up a whopping profit on the $180,000 Ebsworth paid for the work in 1973.

The painter's previously highest selling work was East Wind Over Weehawken, which sold for $40.4m in 2013.