World’s largest auction worth $ 1 billion: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s collection of art up for sale

What could become “the largest art auction in history” will take place next week. The vast private collection of the late Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allenshould reach the record figure of 1 billion dollars. They are part of it over 150 masterpiecesamong which Les Poseuses, Ensemble (petite version) by Georges Seurat and the landscape The Montagne Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanneboth of which are expected to sell for over $ 100 million, and the work Birch forest by Gustav Klimt from 1903, which was estimated by the auctioneer to be worth $ 90 million.

Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection will be sold by Christie’s at the Rockefeller in New York, during the day of 9 and 10 November. Among the wonderful works of the collection there are also those of Botticelli – with the Madonna of the Magnificat – Picasso, Monet, Gaugin, Cézanne and again David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and JMW Turner. Allen himself selected all the works, which they cover a span of over 500 years, and has never relied on any art buyer to choose them, unlike many billionaires. “When you look at a painting you look in a different country, in someone else’s imagination, as they saw it,” Allen said of his collection when some of his works were exhibited in 2016.

Christie’s said the sale is “ready to be the largest and most outstanding art auction in history», Capable of exceeding the 922 million dollars achieved by the sale of the Macklowe collection last May, following the divorce of real estate tycoon Harry Macklowe from his wife Linda.

All proceeds will be donated to charity, as determined by Allen, who died in 2018 at the age of 65 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In 2010, when he was the 37th richest person in the world, with an estimated $ 13.5 billion in fortune, he pledged to leave most of this fortune to charity. There Paul G Allen Family Foundation invests primarily in Pacific Northwest communities, with a focus on regional arts, disadvantaged populations and the environment.

Allen, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with childhood friend Bill Gates, has donated more than $ 2.5 billion throughout its life to help save endangered species, fund bioscience and new technology research, and fund ocean floor exploration projects.

Max Carter, vice president of Christie’s for 20th and 21st century art, said al Guardian that Allen’s art collection was “like Cézanne’s breathtaking view of Mont Sainte-Victoire … the top of the mountain”. “From The five senses of Brueghel and the Venetian fantasies of Turner and Manet – continues Carter – to the late 19th century masterpieces of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Monet, to the Birch forest by Klimt et al Large interior W11 (after Watteau) by Lucian Freud, probably the greatest work of the last 50 years, the collection is defined only by vision and quality ».