Historic auction at Christie's

Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection was the title of Christie's auction of the collection of Microsoft co-founder Allen − and thus cleverly stoked the hype around the auction. On 9 November alone, the first day of the auction, the auction house sold all the paintings on offer within two and a half hours. The total proceeds of 1.5 billion US dollars are the highest sum ever raised within one auction by just one collector. It even far surpassed the Macklowe Collection at Sotheby's. It amounted to 922 million US dollars. The second day of sales of the Allen collection on 10 November put another 115 million US dollars on top. Allen, who died in 2018, had arranged for the proceeds to go to charity.

More than 20 painters set new records. Andrew Wyeth's Day Dream (1980), for example, cost 20 million US dollars, Gustav Klimt's Birch Forest (1903) 104.5 million US dollars. Works by four other painters also cracked the 100 million dollar mark: Georges Seurat's Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) (1888) fetched 149.2 million US dollars, Vincent Van Gogh's Verger avec cyprès (1888) 117.2 million, Paul Cezanne's La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888/1890) 137.8 million and Paul Gauguin's Maternité II (1899) 105.7 million. Other top prices were recorded by Lucian Freud, Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Hepworth, Max Ernst and Thomas Hart Benton, among others.