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Late Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s stunning art collection — featuring works from Paul Cézanne, Roy Lichtenstein and Georgia O’Keeffe — will soon hit the auction block and could fetch an excess of $1 billion.
In a statement released late Thursday, Christie’s confirmed that it had won the rights to sell more than 150 “masterpieces” spanning 500 years of art history.
Titled “Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection,” the November sale is expected to earn an excess of $1 billion, making it the most expensive art auction in history.
Christie’s confirmed that all proceeds will be divided among several charities, “pursuant to Mr. Allen’s wishes.”
Allen, who died in 2018 of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Bill Gates. After leaving the company in 1983 (he remained on the board until 2000), he built a veritable reputation as a philanthropist and collector.
Valued at $20 billion at the time of his death, Allen’s lifetime charitable contributions totaled $2 billion distributed to medical, cultural, and environmental causes. The founder of both Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture and the Seattle Art Fair, Allen was also a frequent lender to the Seattle Art Museum.
A passionate but discreet collector, Allen was posthumously identified as the anonymous 2016 buyer of Claude Monet’s “Meule,” the first in his haystacks series. The painting was sold at Christie’s for $81.4 million.
Other anticipated highlights at the auction include Jasper Johns’s 1960 “Small False Start,” expected to start bidding at $50 million, and Paul Cézanne’s 1888-90 landscape “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire,” valued at $100 million.
