Five of the paintings entered the select club of works sold for more than 100 million dollars at auction.
The most expensive work of the evening, “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (petite version)”, from 1888, by the painter Georges Seurat and considered a masterpiece of pointillism, reached 149.24 million.
The auction house had announced that the entire amount of the sales would go to charity. Even though he had fallen out with Bill Gates, with whom he created Microsoft in 1975, Paul Allen had signed his “donation promise” in 2009, with which he pledged to donate most of his fortune.
Only 60 of the 150 lots were sold on Wednesday and the rest of the auction will take place this Thursday, with a value that has already surpassed the previous record of the Macklowe collection, belonging to a millionaire couple from New York, which reached 922 million dollars at Sotheby’s last spring.
Following Seurat’s painting, Paul Cézanne’s work “Montagne Sainte-Victoire” (1888-1890), a precursor to Cubism, fetched $137.79 million, an auction record for a work by the French painter.
Also Auction records broken for Vincent Van Gogh paintingthe “Verger avec cyprès”, which was sold for 117.1 million dollars, and for a work by Paul Gauguin, whose work from his Tahiti period “Maternité II” (1899), was bought for 105.73 million, also a record for this artist.
With these sales, and that of a portrait of Marilyn Monroe “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” by Andy Warhol, sold in May for 195 million dollars – the most for a work of the 20th century – the year 2022 is shaping up to be one of the most expensive in the history of the art market.