Art from the private collection of late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen fetched over $1.5 billion on Wednesday to become the largest single-owner sale in auction history. Works by Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Gustav Klimt all sold for over $100 million on a record-shattering night at Christie's in New York. Spanning 500 years of art history, art from Allen's collection is being offered over the course of two nights, with all proceeds going to philanthropic causes, the auction house said. Christie's had initially estimated that the 150-plus works would sell for a combined $1 billion, but the landmark sum was exceeded even before the conclusion of day one.
Works by contemporary artists Jasper Johns and Lucian Freud were also among the record-breakers, while paintings by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jackson Pollock are among dozens more still to go under the hammer on Thursday evening. The night's single biggest sale was Seurat's "Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)," pictured above, which fetched over $149.2 million — almost five times the previous record for the French artist's work.
Elsewhere, Cézanne's oil on canvas "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire," on of more than 30 views he painted of the French mountain range, sold for almost $137.8 million. Allen acquired the famed alpine scene in 2001 for $35 million, then the second-highest price paid for a Cézanne at auction, according to Max Carter, a vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art at Christie's. Only five of the painter's views of Sainte-Victoire are left in private hands, Carter added. "Each one is from a slightly different vantage point. Most of them are slightly further back," he told CNN in an interview prior to Wednesday's sale. "It's also rare that it's... not obscured by any trees in front of the mountain."
A Van Gogh painting, "Verger avec cyprès," meanwhile fetched almost $117.2 million to become the most expensive work by the artist ever to sell at auction. Painted in Arles, France, two years before the artist's death, it is "as special as any Van Gogh we've offered in 30 years," according to Carter. "This is when his color has become unmoored from reality and is dictated by imagination," Carter said. Out of the orchard series, "only five are in private hands," he added. "The vast majority are in museums." The two other artworks to attract nine-figure bids were Gauguin's "Maternité II," which fetched $105.7 million, and Klimt's "Birch Forest," a large-scale landscape that sold for over $104.5 million.
Showing a dappled wood scene on the outskirts of Vienna, and painted in Klimt's romantic Art Nouveau style, the latter artwork is "almost like a fairy tale," Carter said. The sale set a new auction record for the Austrian artist a decade and a half after it was part of a landmark sale that included five Klimt masterpieces once looted by Nazis.
The Gauguin painting also smashed a previous auction record for the artist's work (though one sold at a private sale in 2015 reportedly sold upwards of $300 million). Allen bought the canvas, which has religious overtones in its mother-and-child composition, in 2004 for a then-record $39 million. It was painted during Gauguin's 10-year stint in French Polynesia, a period of his life that is rife with controversy (he fathered a child with a teenager there) but that produced paintings that are still highly sought-after. "Most of the paintings or drawings that come up (for sale) tend to be from earlier periods in his life," Carter said.
