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The Headlines

A TEN-FIGURE SALE. Clear your schedule, ready your paddle, and line up a pile of cash (or a fulsome line of credit): The treasure-filled collection of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen is coming to Christie’s in New York in November with a valuation north of $1 billion, ARTnews reports. The proceeds will go to charity, as Allen—who died in 2018 —had planned. The lot lineup has not yet been announced, but it will include more than 150 works from artists including Botticelli and Cézanne, whose La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888–90) is arriving with an estimate above $100 million. (The exact timing of the auction has not yet been announced.) If all goes according to plan, the haul will set a new all-time record for a single-collection auction.

GOO GONE. Following cases of climate activists gluing themselves to the frames of artworks in the U.K. and Italy, the movement has now reached Germany, with actions this week at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden (a Raphael), the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt (Poussin), and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (Cranach the Elder), the Associated Press reports. An organization that advocates for cultural institutions in the country, the German Cultural Council, slammed the protests. “As much as I can understand the despair of the climate activists, I say clearly that the act of gluing themselves to the frames of famous works of art is clearly wrong,” Olaf Zimmermann, its managing director, told the AP. “The risk of damaging the artworks is very high.” 

The Digest

The art collection of tech mogul Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft who died at the age of 65 in 2018, will be sold at Christie’s in what will be one of the highest-valued single-owner sales ever to come on the open market, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday.

Listed among the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors for more than two decades, Allen amassed a collection worth an estimated $1 billion. The house has not yet announced when Allen’s holdings will hit the block.

Christie’s will sell a group of 150 artworks from Allen’s estate, the collection poised to be the most expensive ever sold at auction, beating out two recent marquee single-owner holdings. It is likely to surpass the $922 million generated by the sale of the court-ordered Macklowe’s collection, sold at Sotheby’s earlier this year, as well as the 2018 sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018, which brought in $835 million.

Allen, whose cause of death was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, designated his sister Jody Allen as sole executor of his estate. She remains chair of his investment company, Vulcan.

Known primarily as a tech pioneer starting in the mid-’70s, Allen also gained a reputation for being a serious philanthropist and art collector, a vocation around which he was highly discreet. He first appeared on the Top 200 Collectors list in 1997, and held a place there in every edition until his death in 2018. In the 2020 edition, ARTnews predicted that Allen’s collection would soon head to auction.

After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Almost an hour long, the video features actors reading aloud from a selection of inquiring letters that vary widely in affect, etiquette, and contextual detail. Whereas some performances are deadpan, as is the enactment of a clear-sighted married mother of four from Walla Walla, Washington, others brim with emotion, like that of a teary woman, a chihuahua sitting on her lap as she vocalizes a mother writing from Hood River, Oregon, on behalf of her pregnant 21-year-old daughter. Each reader sits before a different resplendent bouquet that injects an uneasy funereal quality; after all, the video does not reveal the outcomes for any of the women whose stories are so briefly told here. The actors appear in clothing from the mid-2000s rather than period dress, as if to bring the compendium into the present to illuminate the ongoing obstacles individuals face when seeking abortions.

While the video makes this epistolary archive audible, the bound collection and wall installation—a checkered pattern of enlarged photocopied reproductions and decorative wrapping paper—make it visible. The emphatic physical presentation of these formerly furtive letters elicits a tension between public and private, while the project as a whole considers silence and speech, stillness and action. As if anticipating an era of nauseating regression, Bowers’s eternally urgent work insists that, when words fail us most, we need them more than ever.

July 14 – August 19, 2022

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June 12 – August 28, 2022

June 29 – September 4, 2022

August 4 – 27, 2022

June 1 – August 27, 2022

June 24 – August 26, 2022

July 9 – August 27, 2022

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