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Paintings and sculptures owned by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen have been sold for a record $1.5bn (£1.3bn).
It was the largest art auction in history, according to Christie’s.
The auction house said works by Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne and Gustav Klimt each sold for more than $100m (£88m), breaking individual records for those artists.
The proceeds from the sale will be donated to charities supported by Allen before his death in 2018.
The most expensive piece of art bought was Seurat’s 1888 work Les Poseuses, Ensemble (small version), a renowned work of pointillism, which fetched $149.2m (£131m), including fees, Christie’s said.
Other record-breaking works included Van Gogh’s Orchard with Cypresses, which fetched $117.2m (£103m); Gauguin’s Maternity II, which sold for $105.7m (£93m); and Klimt’s Birch Forest, which went under the hammer for $104.6m (£92m).
Paintings from Georgia O’Keefe, Claude Monet, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth and Pablo Picasso were also sold, along with sculptures by Alexander Calder and Max Ernst.
He was treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, but it returned, and in 2018 he died from complications of the disease.
In 2010, he pledged to leave the majority of his fortune to charity after his death. At the time he was the 37th richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated $13.5bn (then £8.8bn).
A further 90 lots from his collection will be sold on Thursday.
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