The auction at Christie’s in New York of the art collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in 2018, passed the historic billion-dollar mark on Wednesday evening, with a shower of records for works by Van Gogh, Cézanne or Gauguin.
As a sign that the art market continues to grow despite economic uncertainties linked to the war in Ukraine and inflation, five paintings entered the closed circle of works sold at auction for over $ 100 million during this memorable evening at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
The most expensive, Georges Seurat’s “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (small version)” (1888), a painting considered a masterpiece of pointillism, of which another version hangs at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, reached 149.24 million. dollars including taxes, Christie’s said. The company did not provide information on the identity of the buyers, which is customary for auction houses.
Christie’s, controlled by François Pinault’s holding company Artémis, had announced that the entire amount of the sales would be donated to charity. Despite the quarrel with Bill Gates, his partner in the birth of Microsoft in 1975, the American billionaire Paul Allen signed his “Giving Pledge” in 2009, pledging to donate most of his fortune.
– Multi-talent billionaire –
While only 60 of the 150 lots were sold on Wednesday – the rest will be Thursday – the value of the collection has already surpassed the previous record for the Macklowe collection, named after a wealthy New York couple, which reached $ 922 million since competitor Sotheby’s in the spring. According to an AFP calculation, the sale was about 1.5 billion dollars.
One billion was surpassed in lot number 32, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Donna di Venezia III, sold for 25 million dollars, an almost trivial figure on Wednesday evening, in the crowded auction room of Christie’s.
From the German-American painter-sculptor Max Ernst, whose sculpture “The King Playing with the Queen” sold for $ 24.3 million, to the American Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists in the collection, whose lithograph “Small False Start”, sold for 55.35 million, passing through Diego Rivera and Lucian Freud, numerous auction records for artists fell one after another.
This avalanche testifies to the quality of the collection amassed by Paul Allen, a multi-millionaire handyman, who had founded a “pop culture” museum in his hometown of Seattle, and who owned several sports franchises, including the Seattle Seahawks.
– Safe investment –
Thus, after Georges Seurat’s “Les Poseuses”, a “Montagne Sainte-Victoire” (1888-1890) by Paul Cézanne, heralding Cubism, reached 137.79 million.
Records were also broken for Vincent Van Gogh, whose “Orchard with Cypresses” sold for $ 117.1 million, or for Paul Gauguin, whose Tahitian period painting, “Maternity II” (1899), went to $ 105.73 million. A work by Gustav Klimt, “Birch Forest”, reached $ 104.5 million, another record.
With these sales, and that of Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which started in May for $ 195 million, 2022 should remain one of the most expensive in the history of the art market.
According to auction house experts, art is more than ever a safe investment in the eyes of the richest, despite an uncertain economic environment.
“Customers want to diversify their assets, to exploit the art and because they know that most of the works continue to increase in value over time,” the co-president of Impressionists and Moderns Department explained to AFP, a few days before the sale. Christie’s artist, Adrien Meyer.
“There are more billionaires than masterpieces” available on the market, he summed up, and “the demand is very diverse”, with a growing presence of customers from Asia and the Middle East. .
