A funny thing happened Wednesday night during the most expensive art sale in human history. While a relatively lowball run of lots were on the block—a few of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s six- and seven-figure masterworks sandwiched between a Gustav Klimt that sold for $104 million and a Vincent van Gogh that sold for $117 million—I left the Christie’s saleroom in its Rockefeller Center headquarters to use the loo. Inside I found Guillaume Cerutti, the global CEO of Christie’s, huddled somewhat conspiratorially with Jussi Pylkkänen, the auction house’s global president. Seconds before, Pylkkänen had been on the rostrum, on the horn with a client who was bidding $120 million on Cézanne’s painting of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. It was a prize no doubt. Cézanne’s kooky obsession with the Aix-en-Provence mountain range spurred on impressionism’s march toward modernism, and this is the last of the depictions in private hands.

With no other bidders but Pylkkänen, auctioneer Adrien Meyer slammed down the hammer, and with fees the total was nearly $138 million, more than doubling the previous record for a Cézanne sale at auction that stood for more than two decades. It would have been a mind-blowing sale to contemplate on almost any other night in the history of selling and buying art. On Wednesday, however, it was only lot 14 of 59, and the sale was already an hour in; collectors had dinner reservations. David Zwirner was spotted exiting at some point between lots 15 and 16.

So it appears that, in that bathroom huddle, Coach Cerutti had called up the bullpen to relieve his starting pitcher. When an Alberto Giacometti came up for auction a few lots later, Pylkkänen gracefully took the gavel as Meyer exited stage left. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” another reporter asked. Nope. Occasionally the auctioneers get swapped out during four-hour marathon day sales, but never during a marquee evening sale. With the switcheroo, a gasp came over a jaded crowd that had barely blinked when a Botticelli sold for $48.5 million. (Christie’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the switch.)

Immediately Pylkkänen launched into his plummy auctioneer patter, calling the four-foot-tall Giacometti sculpture “a nice thing, a wonderful object,” and looking down at phone-to-ear mega-dealer Christophe van de Weghe and saying, “Chris, are you coming in?” Estimated to sell for $20 million, it went for $25 million to a client on the phone with a Christie’s specialist from Switzerland, primo Giacometti territory.

A few seconds later, a Christie’s rep came by the press pen and ducked down to whisper something.

“One billion dollars, you got that?” the rep said. “We hit it with Giacometti.”

I was trying to do the math in my head, and with the number of eight-and-nine-figure lots I realized, yes, with fees, that would add up to hit the elusive 10-figure mark. The world had its first billion-dollar art sale. The night was barely halfway over. The grand total ended up at $1.5 billion, making it the highest-grossing auction of all time. It nearly doubled the previous record, and smashed the record for most valuable private collection, soaring past the mark by more than half a billion. It’s possible no sale of physical objects—not counting any corporate takeover or any M&A megadeals—has ever come close to this total. Accounting for inflation, collectors on Wednesday spent nearly four times what Thomas Jefferson dropped on the Louisiana Purchase.

The record-smashing total points to the eye-popping wealth and picture-buying tenacity of the late multibillionaire Allen, who died in 2018 at age 65. Yes, he compiled what’s now the most expensive art collection in history, but that’s just the oil-on-canvas portion of everything he bought over the years, which amounts to an unthinkable array of fancy stuff.

Allen stepped down from Microsoft in 1983 after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and used the latter half of his life to empty his coffers stuffed to the brim with software moola. He bought boats—yachts, specifically, including the 416-foot Octopus, which was sold last year after being listed for $278 million. For that amount of dough, the dinghy has the option to deploy submarines from the back and do some deep diving. He also had a 300-footer, Tatoosh, that sold last week. It had a list price of $90 million. He bought sports teams in his hometown region, a hobby that turned out to be a pretty nice investment. He picked up the Portland Trail Blazers for $70 million, and now they’re worth $2.1 billion, according to Forbes. He bought the Seattle Seahawks for $194 million, and now, per Forbes, they’re worth $4.5 billion.

Allen liked fighter jets, and bought beat-up World War II–era planes and spent millions kitting them out so they could fly again, just for kicks. Ditto the dozen German tanks he’s meticulously bought and refabbed. Those are just for fun, so he also owned several private jets. (He owned a Boeing 757, but sold it to Donald Trump for a reported $100 million.) He bought a penthouse at a Park Avenue co-op, and then he bought another apartment in the same Fifth Avenue co-op. He bought a spit of land off the coast of Washington State that happened to be called Allan Island. He bought a house in Beverly Hills that’s so big you need a funicular to get up to it. He funded private space shuttles years before Musk, Branson, and Bezos. He bought the original manuscript of Dracula. He bought Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and some other pretty fancy ones he used to jam with Eric Clapton and Joe Walsh of the Eagles. He spent $500 million on brain research, and gave away a total of more than $2 billion to various charities.

And along the way he was building up what can only be called a world-class art collection, one that spanned centuries without much of a fixed point—everything from Brueghel to Damien Hirst. He bought an Eric Fischl painting directly from a show at Mary Boone in 2005, and a Hockney painting from Pace in 2009. Earlier this month, I was given a tour of the collection installed at Christie’s courtesy of Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s 20/21 art departments. Walking through the preview was a dazzling and disorienting experience, to see such bangers, one after another, works that would get pride of place in any museum instead hung in one of the dozen homes owned by the tech titan. The excitement for the install was palpable—a Taxi TV segment had been playing to cab-riders for weeks, and the lines to get in snaked so far through Midtown you’d think people were waiting for Saturday Night Live tickets.

As Rotter walked me through, one peculiar narrative to the collection that emerged was the sheer number of paintings of Venice. Anyone who’s ever seen Octopus pull into the Grand Canal and dwarf all the other merely eight-figure yachts during the Venice Biennale knew that Allen loved him some Venice. In 1997, he flew out 200 guests, including Sting and Robin Williams, to the city, shuttled them out to his yacht for a classic masked ball, albeit one where Allen was playing guitar next to Carlos Santana. Venice scenes by Manet, John Singer Sargent, Turner, Canaletto, Henri Le Sidaner—all featured in the evening sale.

He was also quite willing to pay enormous prices for a work that he decided to fight for at auction. In 2016, he reportedly outlasted bidders for 14 minutes to win Monet’s grainstack painting for more than $81 million, nearly double the estimate. In 1998, a large Lucien Freud came up at Sotheby’s with an estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, enormous sums to ask for a painter who, at the time, had barely broken a million at auction. But Allen wanted the painting, and bid it up to $5.8 million, smashing the artist’s record. It was a keen investment. Wednesday night it sold for $86 million, again a record.

“He pursued when he came to auction and he wanted something,” Rotter said as we walked through the sale. “I don’t want to say he never stopped, because I don’t know, I would have to look—but it was hard to make him stop. That’s the real passionate collector. When you’re a passionate collector, when you get the collecting bug, you follow this pursuit. And if you have enough change in your pocket, so to speak, it makes it easier.”

But despite the famous-tech-billionaire provenance and the obvious quality of the work, some had doubts that the sale could attract the major fireworks that caused the Rockefeller estate to go well over its $700 million estimate when it sold in 2018 for a total of $835 million. Several advisers and art-market prognosticators spelled out gloom and doom scenarios for the sale in the days leading up to it: Only a handful of people in the world can buy nine-figure pictures, and many of them are watching the global economy tank. The sale also comes at the very start of the buying bonanza that is the bellwether evening sales in New York, with plenty of other things to swipe the platinum card for the week following. The sale was also the day after the midterm elections.

“Would I be oblivious to say, in these times, this is a home run, that anything is a home run these days? No, nothing is, because the times are difficult for America, for Europe, for Asia, for everyone—everyone has their own problems,” Rotter said, a week before the sale went down.

Still, he was cautiously optimistic, maybe.

“Honestly, no one who loves art walks into this room and is not happier just for a moment,” he said. “That gives me hope—that there will be someone of these thousands of people that walks through the galleries and says, ‘I want to buy it.’”

Holding a sale the day after an election is always a risk. But tech layoffs and a dipping Dow aside, the art-market worrywarts seemed to see their spirits brighten as the election essentially retained the status quo. At Lodi, Ignacio Mattos’s Rock Center trattoria, those having presale cocktails and spuntino said that they were expecting a few bangs. Inside the saleroom, the mood did seem borderline jubilant, as former Sotheby’s rainmaker Tobias Meyer bro-hugged collector Tico Mugrabi in the aisle next to Larry Gagosian and his team held court. Steve Martin, the actor and collector, took a seat near the center of the room, as mega-dealers such as Per Skarstedt and Amy Cappellazzo took their normal perches. Instead of the customary classical tunes that precede the auctions at Christie’s, the hi-fi blasted Hendrix, a nod to Allen’s heart of rock and roll.

“Taken together, this auction will be the most successful in Christie’s history,” Adrien Meyer noted before he began his auctioneering. Once he started gaveling, the bidding came fast and furious, shooting the hammer prices well above the high estimates. Dallas-based specialist Capera Ryan bagged an Edward Steichen photograph of the Flatiron building for $11.8 million, just shy of the world record for a photo. The adviser Deb Robinson of Art Market Advisors bought, on behalf of a client, a Georgia O’Keeffe for nearly $27 million, well above the high estimate of $8 million. A Gauguin Tahiti scene, a sister painting to one hanging in the Hermitage, sold to Christie’s specialist Maria Los’s client for $105.7 million.

And then Xin Li beat out her fellow Christie’s specialists to win the most enviable Seurat in private hands for $149 million, making it the biggest sale of the evening.

What’s remarkable is that the sale could have been even bigger—several works from the Allen collection were not included for the sale, held back by the family to either keep or sell at a later date. (All the proceeds from the sale will be donated to charities, though what charities exactly have not been announced.) That record-breaking Monet grainstack painting that Allen bought for $81.4 million? Not in this sale, alas. Neither was Roy Lichtenstein’s The Kiss, which Allen bought from David Geffen. (Allen was an investor in Geffen’s DreamWorks, and the two convinced Lichtenstein to design the studio’s logo.) He also had a Rothko that the writer Blake Gopnik casually valued at $80 million a decade ago, Renoir’s The Reader, and Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, a water lily painting that was one of Allen’s first major acquisitions. None were in the sale. The held-back lots could have arguably brought the auction into the two-billion-plus range.

“This was not like all of the collection of Paul Allen, it was just the part that was, you know, in different houses,” Rotter said. “I don’t know what’s happening with them, a different person owns them now and maybe they’ll come for sale. Maybe they won’t come for sale. But so far, none of the people that tell me what he doesn’t sell can get it out of him.”

Perhaps having the most expensive sale of all time was more than enough. As the final lots went, collectors left for their dinner reservations, certainly a bit late but not cranky, giddy at the prospect of a strong art market even amidst, well, everything else. And having spent the auction monitoring his specialists and sending in another auctioneer to close out the proceedings, Guillaume Cerutti sat quietly by the entrance to the sale room. The CEO was already thinking about next week, when the house he runs has another billion dollars of art to offload.

“What a night, what an exciting night—but it’s not over yet,” he said.

Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…The LACMA Art+Film Gala—is it the West Coast Met Gala? The Oscars of the art world? It’s certainly a gale-force black-tie Hollywood soiree, and last Saturday, Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow once again hosted the fundraiser for the encyclopedic Tinseltown museum that picks a luminary from each of its two titular worlds to celebrate with the spotlight for a night. This year’s honorees were hero light-and-space artist Helen Pashgian and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, and the proceedings helped the fundraiser net more than $5 million for the museum, which is about halfway done with its extensive rebuilding process that will cost upward of $750 million. Why is the gala different from all others? Well, it’s in the name—we’re talking art and film, people. Gucci, the presenter of the event, dressed Andrew Garfield and Olivia Wilde, but also Mark Bradford and Catherine Opie. Flashbulbs popped for Kim Kardashian and assorted Kardashian-Jenners, and the newly Oscar-less Sean Penn was there, and Addison Rae dutifully captioned her arrival pic “@lacma”—but a good chunk of the 650-strong gala-going crew were the artists, such as Jonas Wood, Shio Kusaka, Jordan Wolfson, Louise Bonnet, Alex Hubbard, Lauren Halsey, Charles Gaines, Tacita Dean, Alex Israel, Betye Saar, Martine Syms, and so many more. But, okay, sure, everyone was upstaged by Billie Eilish’s art-benefit boyfriend reveal, with both she and Jesse Rutherford in matching Gucci pajamas.

…It seems like there’s a new member’s club opening up in Manhattan each week, but none have quite the patina of exclusivity like newly opened London import Casa Cruz—the spot doesn’t accept members, it accepts investors, and the level of entry begins at $250,000. While several of the restaurants at the six-story converted beaux arts mansion are open to the public (if you can get a res) the rooftop and fourth floor are reserved for investors and their guests. Except for last Thursday, when Gagosian took over the coveted private real estate to celebrate Anna Weyant’s first show at the gallery with dinner at the rooftop that has the highest cost of admission in the city. The show has been hotly anticipated by a collector class who have watched Weyant’s paintings sell for as much as $1.6 million at auction. She’s also dating Larry Gagosian, the founder of the gallery. All that takes a backseat to the show, which is anchored by seven paintings, including Two Eileens (2022), a lush, masterful double portrait of the downtown micro-celebrity and podcast host Eileen Kelly. The place is quite posh, and walking up the spiral staircase to this cabana-style bar by the upstairs room, I bumped into Kelly, who was standing between the artist Stanley Whitney and the writer Emma Cline, and after saying hello to Gagosian, I was introduced to none other than Venus Williams. After one meal I’d say, yeah, Casa Cruz rooftop access… probably worth the quarter-mil?

…We hear that in the new show of Ronald Lauder’s personal collection that opens tomorrow at his Neue Galerie, there’s an entire room stuffed with memorabilia related to the classic 1942 film Casablanca. In addition to snapping up German and Austrian masterpieces of the art nouveau era—including Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which he bought for $135 million in 2006—he’s apparently spent a whole lot of time buying posters from the original release and props from the set of the Bogart-Bergman classic, including the letters of transit that Rick found so darn tricky to obtain for Ilsa in the film. Hopefully all this cool Casablanca stuff can cheer up Ron after he plowed all that money into Lee Zeldin’s campaign.

…Rashid Johnson and other artists have each donated a work to be sold at Christie’s next week during its spree of auctions to benefit the Right of Return Fellowship, a charity started by the artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig that helps formerly incarcerated people support their creative or artistic pursuits. Johnson’s Surrender Painting “Sunshine” is estimated to bring in $600,000 to $800,000, while a photograph by Mickalene Thomas could bring in $200,000 to $300,000.

One could be excused for being done with art fairs for a bit, what with the extended jaunts through London and Paris, and maybe even Toronto and Torino—maybe let’s chill for a second, at least until Miami? Not so fast. Early November happens to bring to the Big Apple a nice little fair called the Art Show, presented by the Art Dealers Association of America. Even the bloodthirsty gallery circuit has its nonprofit bureaucracies, and the ADAA has been around since 1962, trying to keep the art market honest by promoting “the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship, and ethical practice within the profession.”

The Art Show, which the ADAA holds at the stately Park Avenue Armory, is scholarly and ethical and filled with connoisseurs just as much as Miami Basel is filled with rappers and crypto-bros. What’s more, the fair’s opening night benefits the Henry Street Settlement, and Upper East Side residents pay $1,000 a pop in order to get entry at the opening hour. What they paid to see: new paintings by Marcus Jahmal at the Anton Kern booth, exuberant portraits hung under smaller skull paintings; a banger of an Alighiero Boetti map-painting at the Totah booth; Karma’s booth, with drawings by dozens of artists installed salon-style cheek by jowl, filling every inch of the booth; and Raul Guerrero’s paintings of his favorite watering holes, like The Odeon in New York and Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles. As these well-heeled locals checked out the goods, one had made the arduous four-minute trek from 2 East 67th Street to the Armory: Leonard Lauder, brother to Ronald, looking spry near the entrance to the fair. Unlike his brother, Leonard gave to Kathy Hochul. As he left the fair, the election was five days away.

And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected].