Category Archives: Lucian Freud

Microsoft co-founder’s collection poised to raise $1bn in ‘largest art auction in history’

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Proceeds from sale of 150 works owned by the late billionaire Paul Allen will go to charity

The vast private art collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is expected to fetch a record-breaking $1bn (£890m) when it is auctioned next week.

The collection of more than 150 masterpieces includes Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (petite version) and Paul Cézanne’s landscape La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which are both expected to sell for more than $100m, and Gustav Klimt’s 1903 work Birch Forest, which has an auctioneer’s estimate of $90m.

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Lucian Freud’s etching of Wolseley restaurant creator to be sold

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Artist dined at Mayfair restaurant almost every night in later years, and would sometimes share a table with co-founder Jeremy King

A portrait by Lucian Freud of the restaurateur behind the Wolseley, the Mayfair establishment where the artist dined nearly every evening in the last few years of his life, is to be sold next month.

Freud was completing the etching of Jeremy King when he died in 2011. The two had become friends over a period of about 30 years after Freud began dining at Le Caprice, another King establishment (and a favourite of Diana, Princess of Wales’s), and at the Wolseley when it opened in 2003.

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Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

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The artist insisted he did not paint Standing Male Nude, but three specialists have concluded it is his work

Almost 25 years ago, a Swiss art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting – a full-length male nude – at auction. He then received a call from the British artist, asking to buy it from him. The two men did not know each other, and the collector politely refused, as he liked the picture.

Three days later, he claims he received another call from a now furious Freud who told him that, unless he sold it to him, he would deny having painted it.

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