The art collection of the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, will be sold at a mega auction at Christie’s.
Once the auction gets finalized, it will be the most expensive single-owner art collection ever to be sold in an auction. The total worth of the Paul Allen collection is estimated to be about $1 billion.
The collection of 150 artworks from the estate of Paul Allen will go on the block on an unspecified date at Christie’s. The collection includes works like Small False Start (1960) by Jasper John, estimated to be sold for $50 million. La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888-90), the landscape by Paul Cézanne, can go as high as a whopping $100 million. It is already speculated that the auction will break the record of the most expensive single-collection auction ever. It surpasses the likes of Macklowe’s collection (sold for $922 million at Sotheby’s earlier this year) and David Rockefeller’s collection (which collected $832 million at Christie’s in 2018). Marc Porter (Chairman, Christie’s America) said that all proceeds from the auction will go towards charity.
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Paul Allen first found notoriety as the tech genius who co-founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates. However, he was also secretly an art aficionado and continued to grow his art collection without ever being vocal about it. In fact, the first time the world saw Allen as an art collection was when he was included in the 1997 Top 200 Collectors list. Since then, he was featured in every edition till his death. Paul Allen died in 2018 after suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He left the entirety of his art collection to Jody Allen, his sister.
