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 Henr

His Marilyn Monroe paintings and oversize soup cans are cultural icons, but in an exhibition opening Monday, New York’s Whitney Museum hopes to paint a new, more complex picture of Andy Warhol. These days, few dare to tackle the king of pop art: he has already been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions and retrospectives. But under the guidance of chief curator Donna De Salvo — who worked with Warhol before his death in 1987 — the modern and contemporary art museum is doing just that. De Salvo believes America’s last Warhol retrospective — in 1989 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art — “changed much of our thinking about Warhol but also left much unanswered.” Now the Whitney, located on the banks of the Hudson River in the city’s Meatpacking

A fashionable Russian-style dress worn by Princess Charlotte, daughter of George IV; three of Fabergé’s celebrated Imperial Easter eggs; and some of the earliest-known photographs of Moscow and St Petersburg are among almost 300 works in the new exhibition Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs, on view now at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. The exhibition examines familial and diplomatic links between Britain and Russia and their royal houses over a period of 300 years, beginning with Peter the Great’s visit to Britain in 1698. Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs is the first exhibition from the Royal Collection to explore these historic links through decorative arts, paintings, jewellery, costume, books, letters and photographs, many of which are on public display for the first time. Emperor Alexander I visited London in 1814, and his presence may have influenced a fashion for Russian cl