Art from Microsoft founder Allen sells for $1.5B

NEW YORK >> Works by artists including Cézanne, Seurat, and van Gogh sold for a recordbreaking $1.5 billion during the first part of Christie’s two-day auction of the late Microsoft cofounder 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. Christie’s experts said that pointillism, a revolutionary technique involving dots of color that combine to form an image, was of particular interest to Allen because of his computer background.