Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen's Art Pieces Sell For $1.5-B

Art from the private collection of late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen fetched over $1.5 billion on Wednesday to become the largest single-owner sale in auction history, Jacqui Palumbo and Oscar Holland reported for CNN late.

Photo Insert: The exhibition "Seeing Nature," based on Allen's collection, toured the US in 2016 and 2017 with stops at the Seattle Museum of Art and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, among others.

Works by Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Gustav Klimt all sold for over $100 million on a record-shattering night at Christie's in New York.

Spanning 500 years of art history, art from Allen's collection is being offered over the course of 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 landmark 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 are among dozens more still to go under the hammer on Thursday evening.

The night's single biggest sale was Seurat's "Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)," which fetched over $149.2 million — almost five times the previous record for the French artist's work. Cézanne's "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire" attracted the night's second biggest sale price, fetching almost $137.8 million.

After spending several decades assembling his collection, Allen lent works to museums around the world, including The National Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The exhibition "Seeing Nature," based on his collection, toured the US in 2016 and 2017 with stops at the Seattle Museum of Art and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, among others. Allen died in 2018 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 65.

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