November 9, 2022
The Billion-Dollar Collection: Paul Allen's Art Goes Under the Hammer
The 2022 sale of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's collection raised a record $1.6 billion — the largest single-owner art auction in history.
When the collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen came to Christie's in November 2022, it rewrote the record books. The sale raised an astonishing $1.6 billion, the largest single-owner auction in history.
Five works each sold for over $100 million, including a Seurat, a Cézanne mountain, a Van Gogh orchard and a Gauguin. It was a once-in-a-generation parade of masterpieces, with all proceeds pledged to philanthropy.
The sale confirmed a truth of the modern market: the very greatest collections, assembled patiently over decades, can command sums that rival the budgets of small nations.
Image: “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884” — Georges Seurat, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.