La Montagne Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne, an oil on canvas from the Paul G. Allen Collection, was one of 60 pieces auctioned by Christie's in New York, on Nov. 9.The Associated Press
Works by artists including Cezanne, Seurat, and van Gogh sold for a record-breaking $1.5-billion during the first part of Christie’s two-day auction of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s masterpiece-heavy collection.
All 60 of the artworks put up for auction Wednesday night in New York sold, and five paintings sold for prices above $100-million.
Georges Seurat’s pointillist Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) sold for $149.2-million, the evening’s highest price. The larger version of Les Poseuses is at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.
Christie’s experts said that pointillism, a revolutionary technique when it was developed by Seurat and Paul Signac involving dots of colour that combine to form an image, was of particular interest to Allen because of his computer background.
The auction house quoted Mr. Allen saying he was “attracted to things like pointillism or a Jasper Johns `numbers’ work because they come from breaking something down into its components – like bytes or numbers, but in a different kind of language.”
Other highlights from Wednesday’s sale included Paul Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which sold for $137.8-million, and van Gogh’s landscape Verger avec cypres,” which sold for $117.2-million.
“Never before have more than two paintings exceeded $100-million in a single sale, but tonight, we saw five,” Max Carter, vice chair of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, said in a news release.
Eighteen works sold for record prices for the artists, who ranged from the 17th century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Younger to the 20th century photographer Edward Steichen.
All proceeds from the sale will benefit philanthropies chosen by Mr. Allen’s estate.
Mr. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018. During his lifetime, he donated more than $2-billion to causes including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research.
The previous single-evening auction record of $852.9-million was set at Christie’s contemporary art sale in New York in 2014.
The Paul Allen estate sale continued on Thursday.