A month after art market financials for the first half of 2022 were released showing New York auctions as the world’s top sellers, followed by London and Hong Kong, the new news shocked both art lovers and and investors. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s iconic art collection, who died in 2018, will be sold at Christie’s in one of the most expensive auctions in history.

Allen, who died at the age of 65 from cancer, was among the top 200 collectors in the world for more than two decades. With skill, but prudently, he amassed a collection worth about a billion dollars. His sister, Jody Allen, is his sole heir. She remains chairman of the Vulcan Investment Company, and proceeds from the mass sale of the collection will go to charity – it is not yet known which institutions will receive donations.

Allen, a technology pioneer since the 1970s, is known to have had an intense and visible philanthropic work while keeping a low profile as an art collector. However, already in the early 2000s, he showed that he was interested in promoting contemporary culture in his city, creating the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle (MoPOP), and a little later, the Seattle Art Fair.

150 works included in the collection will be sold at Christie’s next November. It is this house that tops the list of the international art market with a 49% share. Already in the first half of 2022, he set a record by auctioning the most expensive work of the year, Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), which sold for $170 million.

The collection includes works by Canaletto, Botticelli, Renoir, Gauguin, as well as Rothko, Hopper, Calder and Hockney.

From the looks of it, Allen’s collection will see the house’s revenue skyrocket in the second half of 2022. Allen’s two works alone, Jasper Johns’ collage “Little False Start” and Paul Cezanne’s 1888-1890 landscape “Mount Sainte-Victoire”, are estimated at about $150 million, of which the first is about $50 million, and the rest are paintings by the great French Post-Impressionist painter .

As you can see, the collection covers different periods of art history, from the great masters to the impressionists and, of course, contemporary art. It contains works by Canaletto, Botticelli, Renoir, Gauguin, Seras, as well as Rothko, Hopper, Calder and Hockney. Several works are known to have been sold during Allen’s lifetime, such as Gerhard Richter’s realistic painting “DSenjäger (1953)” in 2016 for $25.5 million.

Meanwhile, America’s second-largest auction house, Sotheby’s, completed another record-breaking two-part sale earlier this year thanks to the infamous Macklow Collection. The success began on December 15, 2021 with the sale of 35 masterpieces of the collection for $676.1 million and ended in May of this year with the remaining works. The total – currently the highest for a private collection sale – was $922 million. The Macklow Collection has been described as a treasure trove of post-war art and was closed for about 50 years, during the marriage of Harry and Linda Macklow.

The previous record for a private collection auction was set in 2018 when Chistie’s auctioned David and Peggy Rockefeller treasures for $835 million. A sum which, in turn, broke the previous record set a few years earlier. A year after his death in 2008, Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection was sold. Exceeding a total of $443 million, it was then considered the most valuable private collection internationally.