Even More of Paul G. Allen’s Massive Collection Is Coming to Christie’s
Three sales will put early computers, technologies from the Space Race, artworks and significant scientific documents and memorabilia on the block.
Christie’s has announced a new series of auctions of pieces from late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s collection, which encompassed both art and technology. The upcoming tech-, space- and art-focused sales, collectively titled Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection, follow the record-setting $1.62 billion auction of 155 masterpieces in the two-part Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection sale at Christie’s in 2022 and will showcase some of the most significant first-generation technologies and the groundbreaking individuals behind them. Gen One kicks off with two online auctions, Firsts: The History of Computing (which honors Allen’s influence on shaping the computer and internet world as we know it) and “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” both closing on September 12. A live sale, “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity, will take place on September 10.
The sales will feature iconic supercomputers, early microcomputers, technologies from the Space Race, artworks and significant documents and memorabilia. One notable item up for auction in Firsts is an early 1971 DEC PDP-10: KI-10 computer with an estimate of $30,000-50,000. This machine played a pivotal role in establishing the technical foundation for the Internet through ARPANET, being the first to support real-time, interactive computing, and this particular model is noteworthy because Paul Allen helped restore it and both he and Bill Gates utilized it.
The live auction, which according to the auction house “tells the story of science and technology from pre-history to the present day,” will put key technologies and symbols from the 1960s Space Race and the Atomic Age on the block. A top lot is the cover layer of the Gemini spacesuit belonging to Ed White, the first American astronaut to perform a spacewalk (estimate: $80,000-120,000). Leading the sale is a letter Albert Einstein wrote to then-President Roosevelt in 1939, informing him of the possibility of an atomic bomb. In the typed letter, Einstein tells the president that the Germans discovered a fissionable form of uranium that could be used to fuel such a devastating weapon. This historic piece of correspondence, depicted in the 2023 Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer, has a high estimate of $6,000,000. There are only two versions of the letter in existence, with the other in the permanent collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.
“Never before has the market seen a collection of this diversity that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity—much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing,” said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, in a statement. “It is a testament to the uniqueness and importance of these objects that one of the greatest innovators of our day collected, preserved, and, in dozens of cases, restored them while both drawing his own inspiration from them and sharing many of them publicly.”
Unleashing the collective genius of humanity across disciplines
Paul Allen was a passionate collector with a discerning eye for objects of scientific and historical importance, and he started building his collection in 1977 with the acquisition of a TOAD-1 Systems Corporation machine. He continued to acquire early computers, sometimes restoring them himself, and eventually founded the Living Computer Museum in 2012 to house his growing collection of vintage technologies. But Allen also collected art and cultural artifacts, and he ultimately built a collection that truly extended to cover all aspects of human genius: art and music, technology and weaponry, and other items related to the history of our civilization.
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Indeed, his vast and eclectic collection encompassed items from so many different disciplines that Allen was able to seed or otherwise support several institutions beyond the Living Computer Museum. His collection of vintage aircraft and related artifacts made up the core of the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum’s collection. He opened a nonprofit art space called Pivot Art + Culture (now closed) in his Seattle-based Institute for Brain Science to showcase his art collection as well as works owned by others. Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP, was first imagined by Allen, who launched it in 2000 as the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (the institution rebranded as MoPOP in 2016).
Lots from the three sales will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center from September 5-9. As with the auctions of Paul Allen’s artwork, the proceeds from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection will support Allen’s philanthropic wishes. During his life, the collector and arts patron donated more than $2.65 billion to philanthropy, supporting a wide range of causes, from bioscience, endangered species, ocean health and environmental sciences to various initiatives in arts and culture. His eponymous foundation continues to support arts and culture in Washington state.