Record-breaking art auction tops $1 billion mark at Christie’s in New York

Uno record! An exceptional auction took place on Wednesday November 9 at Christie’s in New York. The art collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died in 2018, was on offer and surpassed the historic $1 billion mark, with a record slew of works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin. In a sign that the art market continues to grow despite the economic uncertainties linked to the war in Ukraine and inflation, five paintings entered the closed club of works sold for more than 100 million dollars at auction during this memorable evening at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.

The most expensive, The Poseuses, Together (small version) (1888) by Georges Seurat, a painting considered a pointillism masterpiece, another version of which hangs in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, fetched $149.24 million including fees, a announced Christie’s. The company did not provide information on the identity of the buyers, a custom for auction houses.

Christie’s, controlled by François Pinault’s Artémis holding company, had announced that the entire amount of sales would be donated to charity. Despite his falling out with Bill Gates, his partner in the birth of Microsoft in 1975, the American billionaire Paul Allen, had signed a pledge in 2009, pledging to donate the majority of his fortune.

Billionaire jack of all trades

While only 60 of 150 lots were sold on Wednesday – the rest will be on Thursday – the value of the collection has already surpassed the previous record for the Macklowe collection, named after a wealthy New York couple, which reached 922 million dollars at competitor Sotheby’s in the spring. According to a calculation by AFP, the sale totaled around 1.5 billion dollars.

The billion was exceeded for lot number 32, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Woman of Venice IIIsold for 25 million dollars, an almost trivial figure on Wednesday evening, in the crowded auction room of Christie’s.

By the German-American painter-sculptor Max Ernst, whose sculpture The king playing with the queen left for $24.3 million, to American Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists in the collection, including a lithograph Small False Start was sold for 55.35 million, passing through Diego Rivera and Lucian Freud, numerous auction records for artists fell one after the other.

This avalanche testifies to the quality of the collection amassed by Paul Allen, a jack-of-all-trades billionaire, who had founded a “pop culture” museum in his hometown of Seattle, and who owned several sports franchises, including the Seattle Seahawks.

Safe investment

So after The Poseuses by Georges Seurat, a Mount Sainte-Victoire (1888-1890) by Paul Cézanne, herald of cubism, reached 137.79 million.

Records were also broken for Vincent Van Gogh, whose Orchard with cypresses was sold for $117.1 million, or for Paul Gauguin, including a painting from the Tahitian period, Maternity II (1899), went for $105.73 million. A work by Gustav Klimt, Birch Foresthit $104.5 million, another record.

With these sales, and that of a portrait of Marilyn Monroe Shot Sage Blue Marilyn by Andy Warhol, who left in May for 195 million dollars, the year 2022 should remain as one of the most expensive in the history of the art market.

According to experts from auction houses, art is more than ever a safe investment in the eyes of the very wealthy, despite an uncertain economic context.

“Clients want to diversify their assets, to take advantage of the art and because they know that most works continue to increase in value over time”, explained to AFP, a few days before the sale, the co-president of the Impressionists and Modern Art department at Christie’s, Adrien Meyer.

“There are more billionaires than masterpieces” available on the market, he summarized, and “the demand is very diversified”, with an increasingly strong presence of customers from Asia and the Middle East. East.

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