“This is five centuries of great art” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 157 (7358) of 08/27/2022

Bidding art

Auction house Christie’s announced that it is going to put up for sale about 150 works from the collection of entrepreneur, financier and philanthropist Paul Allen (1953-2018), co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. Together, these works are tentatively valued at $ 1 billion. If buyers at the auction, which is scheduled for this fall, do not fail, then Allen’s collection will become the most expensive private collection, at least among those that were sold at a time.

Paul Allen, a childhood friend of Bill Gates, started his collection at the height of his success. And not because he looked back at his fellows on the Forbes list, but because of his individual impression: once in London, he went to Tate and experienced something like an initiation there. It is noteworthy that most of all he was struck by, on the one hand, Turner’s seascapes, and, on the other hand, the works of the pop art classic Roy Lichtenstein. Apparently, his collecting preferences were determined in this way: landscape painting of the 19th-20th centuries made up the most serious part of the collection, but he was also interested in pop art, and (although to a lesser extent, obviously) abstraction – from Mark Rothko to Gerhard Richter.

The list of works from Allen’s collection now offered for sale has not yet been published, only two of the top lots have been named. One is Mount Sainte-Victoire (1888-1890) by Paul Cezanne, part of the famous series of mountain views that the artist painted over several years near Aix-en-Provence; other views of the same mountain that enchanted Cezanne also ended up in Russia (now in the Pushkin Museum and in the Hermitage). Mount Sainte-Victoire was sold in 2001 for $38.5 million; today it is valued at $100 million, possibly bearing in mind that ten years ago, the royal family of Qatar bought Cezanne’s “Card Players” for as much as $250 million (though not at auction, but in a private deal), setting an absolute price for some time. record for works of art. But, given the large number of species of the notorious mountain scattered throughout the world collections, it is still not worth counting on a strong excess of the estimate.

The second top lot of those whose presence at the auction is more or less guaranteed is the collage “Small False Start” (1960) by Jasper Johns. The estimate in his case is $50 million, which looks pretty realistic given that high-profile auction sales of the artist’s works over the past decade have ranged from $28 million to $36 million.

The rest is guesswork. One can speculate based on the fact that Allen willingly released many of his paintings for exhibitions. The public saw, in particular, Van Gogh’s Garden with Peach Trees in Bloom, Klimt’s Birch Forest (autumn forest landscape painted in Klimt’s recognizable morbid-ornamental manner), as well as Venetian vedueta by various authors – Canaletto, Monet, Manet , as well as Turner, whose love was one of the constants for Allen the collector. As well as things of the past and current centuries: Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, David Cockney, Gerhard Richter.

They also talk about the old masters – it seems to be in the collection of Allen Botticelli and certainly there is the “Allegory of Vision” by Jan Brueghel the Younger (from the series “Five Senses”). Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti, in any case, made it clear that the huge selection put up for auction is “five centuries of great art.”

From time to time, Paul Allen sold something from his collection – apparently, obeying the instinct of the market, because he did not turn out to be a loser. So, in 2007, he bought Rothko for $34.2 million, and seven years later he sold it for $56.2 million; in 2006, he bought the “Fighter” by Gerhard Richter for $11.2 million, and in 2016 he earned $25.6 million for it.

It’s too early to talk about the state of the art market this year, but at least by the beginning of summer it was obvious that the post-COVID optimism that emerged last year was still there — there were a lot of record and simply extremely impressive sales. The total amount of $1 billion in this context does not seem supernatural at all. If the figures really reach the ten-digit figure, then the Allen collection will beat the record of the collection of Harry and Linda Macklow: Sotheby’s sold works from this collection for $ 992.2 million (though not in one sitting, but at two auctions held at different times – at the end of last year and in May this year). However, whatever the final profit, it will not go to the heirs of the collector from among his relatives, as is usually the case: in accordance with Allen’s will, the proceeds from the sale will be spent on charitable purposes.

Vasily Lepskikh