Tycoon’s art collection auctioned for record $1.5bn

THE record for artwork sold at auction has been broken for the second time in just six months after the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s collection of masterpieces fetched $1.5 billion (£1.3 billion) at Christie’s.

The flurry of nine-figure sales suggested that the global rich still view art as a hedge against inflation and a safer store of value than increasingly volatile stocks and crypto currencies as the economy experiences a downturn.

Buyers on Wednesday also appeared to be buoyed by the results of the US midterm elections, where a market-rattling political rout was threatened but never materialised, art experts said.

The last record was set in May with the $922million sale of divorcing real estate couple Harry and Linda Macklowe’s collection at Sotheby’s.

Works by artists including Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and Vincent Van Gogh were snapped up during the first part of Christie’s two-day auction of Allen’s collection.

All the artworks put up for auction in New York have sold, and five paintings sold for prices above $100million.

“People want to put their money into hard assets,” the dealer Nicholas Maclean told The New York Times.

Art from Allen’s collection was offered over 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 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 were among dozens more still to go under the hammer last night.

The biggest sale was Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), which fetched mor than $149.2million, almost five times the previous record for the French artist’s work.

Paintings by Freud, O’keeffe, Claude Monet, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth and Pablo Picasso also sold, along with sculptures by Alexander Calder and Max Ernst.

Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from complications of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018.