Sotheby’s to auction 16 works from the collection of bankrupt hedge funder George Allen Weiss: the $123 million debt is paid off

Sotheby’s will auction 16 works of art from the collection of George Allen Weiss, the Miami financier and collector who filed for “Chapter 11” bankruptcy last year, to pay off a debt of $123 million to Bank of America, secured by his art — as Bloomberg reports, citing a statement by his lawyer Paul Battista at Wednesday’s court hearing.

The 16 works will be part of Sotheby’s November sales. According to court documents, the collection contains works by Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Lawyers confirmed that Sotheby’s has guaranteed a minimum price for six of the 16 works, while the full collection numbers at least 25 other works.

Bankruptcy documents from 2025 revealed that Weiss owed $180 million to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), $121.4 million to Bank of America and $113.5 million to Jefferies Strategic Investments. The Bank of America loan must be repaid first, while the remaining proceeds “may go to Jefferies and the other creditors”, according to Bloomberg.

A year ago he tried to sell Claude Monet’s “Nymphéas” (1914–1917) for $36.5 million to reduce the debt. In June, he was preparing the sale of a 1972 Francis Bacon self-portrait through the Gagosian gallery, as ARTnews reports. Earlier he had agreed to consign works by Picasso and Signac.

His story is that of a classic American immigrant: his Jewish parents fled Vienna only two weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Austria. Weiss started work in a restaurant at the age of 11, graduated from the Wharton School and in 1978 founded Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, which at its peak managed $2.7 billion in assets.