Christie’s auction house said Thursday it would handle the sale of the impressive art collection of Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, a collection valued at more than $1 billion that includes masterpieces by Renoir and Roy Lichtenstein.
The sale of at least 150 paintings spanning several centuries is expected to be the biggest art auction ever, according to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The sale is expected to exceed the record $922 million private art collection sale achieved earlier this year by real estate developer Harry Macklowe and his ex-wife Linda Macklowe.
In addition to being a tech pioneer and philanthropist, Allen was a passionate lover of art and culture. When Allen died in 2018 at 65 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he left his $20 billion estate to his sister Jody Allen, who also serves as the chair of his investment company Vulcan.
“He believed that art expressed a unique view of reality — combining the artist’s inner state and inner eye — in a way that can inspire us all,” Jody Allen said in a statement to the Journal.
Among the works to be auctioned are Jasper Johns’s 1960 canvas Small False Start, estimated to sell for at least $50 million, and Paul Cézanne’s 1888–90 landscape La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, valued at around $100 million. Other artists represented in the wide-ranging collection include Botticelli, Jan Brueghel, Manet, Gauguin and Seurat, as well as more contemporary artists such as Edward Hopper and David Hockney.
Allen helped usher in the personal computer era with the co-founding of Microsoft with his high school friend Bill Gates. Allen gained a reputation as a serious art collector after leaving Microsoft in 1983.
In 2016, Allen was the anonymous buyer of Monet’s 1891 canvas of a haystack for $81.4 million, then an auction record, according to Bloomberg. The day before, he sold a photo-realistic painting of a fighter jet screaming across the sky by Gerhard Richter for $25.6 million, more than double the $11.2 million he paid a decade before.
The proceeds from the sale, which will occur at an undetermined date in November, will go to charity, in accordance with Allen’s wishes. During his lifetime, Allen donated more than $2 billion to charitable causes.
