Major works of art that were owned by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen went for big bucks at a two-day Christie’s auction.
Included were works by artists including Cézanne, Seurat, and van Gogh.
The auction brought in a record-breaking $1.6 billion.
All 155 of the artworks put up for auction Wednesday and Thursday 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, Wednesday evening’s highest price.
Christie’s experts said that pointillism, a technique when it was developed by Seurat and Paul Signac involving dots of color that combine to form an image, was of particular interest to Allen because of his computer background.
Other highlights from Wednesday’s sale included Paul Cézanne’s “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire,” which sold for $137.8 million, and van Gogh’s landscape “Verger avec cyprès,” which sold for $117.2 million.
Topping the sales Thursday was Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen’s sculpture, “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X,” which fetched $8.4 million.
All proceeds will benefit philanthropies chosen by Allen’s estate.
Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018.