Over one and a half billion dollars. The collection of the Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allenmade a fortune on prime time ofChristie’s auction, in New York: about 150 pieces that were owned by the partner of Bill Gates, who died in 2018 of lymphoma. Buyers quickly made bids and multiplied the estimated values of virtually all the works. Allen’s collection, which covers nearly 500 years of art history, was split over two days and sixty high-value pieces were offered which, when added together, far exceeded the 922 million raised in May with the sale. from the Macklowe collection. It is therefore a question of the sale with the highest grossing in history auctions.
The most coveted works were those of the great Impressionist masters: “Les poseuses, ensemble” by Georges Seuratan intimate image made with its characteristic pointillistic technique, sold for 149.24 million, five times the maximum price ever reached by the artist.
Among the paintings sold: “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire” by Paul Cezanne ($ 138 million including auction fees); the panorama of a garden of Arles of Van Gogh “Verger avec Cyprès” (117 million) and the “Birch Forest of Gustav Klimt, which found a new buyer for 105 million, a record for the artist at auctions after the 88 million paid the same year, in 2006, by Ronald Lauder for the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the ‘Lady in Gold’, today at the Neue Galerie. Record also for Lucien Freudthe grandson of the father of psychoanalysis, whose “Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau)” reached $ 86 million.