Record Auction: The Art Collection of Microsoft Founder Paul Allen Sold for $1.5 Billion

The art collection of Paul Allen, the entrepreneur and co-founder of Microsoft, who died in 2018, was sold at auction at Christie's for $1.5 billion, a record amount raised in a single auction of works of art.

Paul Allen's collection included more than 150 pieces, including Georges Serre's "Female Nudes," Paul Cézanne's "Mount St. Victoire," Gustav Klimt's "Birchwood," paintings by Sandro Botticelli, Pierre Auguste Renoir, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, William Turner, Vincent van Gogh and others. Before the auction, experts at Christie's expected the Allen collection to fetch $1 billion, calling the upcoming event "the largest and most prominent auction of works of art in history".

As The Guardian notes, the collection was personally selected for years by Paul Allen, who did not want to rely on the choice of hired experts. "When you look at a painting, you look into another country, into someone's imagination, into the way they saw it," Allen said at one of the exhibitions of his collection in 2016.

As Allen wished in his will, all proceeds from the auction will go to charity. The Microsoft co-founder died in 2018 at age 65 of lymphoma. At the time of his death, his fortune was $20.3 billion.