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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Updated March 10, 2012, 5:14 p.m. ET

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A visitor at the blockbuster retrospective 'GerhardRichter: Panorama' at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie; itwill travel to Paris in June.

RelatedThe Art of the Tablet

By KELLY CROW

In the early 1980s, German artist Gerhard Richter painted 24 views of flickering white candles, and not a singleone sold. When one of those "Candle" canvases came up at Christie's in London this past fall, it sold for $16.5million.

Few people can pinpoint the moment when an artist becomesiconic in the way of Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, but rightnow the art world is trying to anoint Mr. Richter. Last year, hisworks sold at auction for a total of $200 million, according toauction tracker Artnet—more than any other living artist andtopping last year's auction totals for Claude Monet, AlbertoGiacometti and Mark Rothko combined. At Mr. Richter's galleryin New York, the waiting list for one of his new works, whichcan sell for $3 million apiece, is several dozen names long.

In November at Sotheby's, London collector Lily Safra paid$20.8 million for Mr. Richter's 1997 eggplant-colored "AbstractPainting," an auction record for the artist. Other artists havesold individual works at higher prices—Jeff Koons, for

example—but in terms of volume at auction, Mr. Richter currently tops the market.

The artist's ascent is being driven by market demands as muchas curatorial merit: Auction houses and museums, eager fornew masters to canonize, are showcasing Mr. Richter's worksaround the world at an ever-increasing clip. An influx of

international collectors and dealers are also seizing the moment to buy or sell his pieces at a profit—includingart-world tastemakers such as Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich, French luxury-goods executive BernardArnault, dealer Larry Gagosian, Taiwanese electronics mogul Pierre Chen and New York hedge-fund managerSteven Cohen.

Mr. Richter's work is uniquely suited to the tastes of the currentart market. Like Picasso, he paints in a number of differentstyles—from rainbow-hued abstracts to poignant familyportraits—giving collectors plenty of choice. Like Warhol, he isprolific, which ensures a steady volume of his works in the

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The Top-Selling Living ArtistLast year at auction, German painter Gerhard Richter outsold Monet, Giacometti and Rothko—combined. Acase study of an artist's rise. Will it last?

Gerhard Richter: The Top-Selling Living Artist - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702047818...

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Germany's Gerhard Richter's artworks sold at auctionlast year for a total of $176 million, more than any otherliving artist. Kelly Crow has a profile of Richter and hiswork on Lunch Break. Photo: Sotheby's

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German artist Gerhard Richter.

The tiny, oil-rich country of Qatar recently rocked the artworld by paying more than $250 million dollars for aCezanne, the highest price ever for a work of art atauction. And while eye-popping numbers like that mightget you thinking about investing in art, it is certainly notfor everyone. Kelsey Hubbard asks Christie's art expertLydia Fenet about art as an investment.

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marketplace—yet enough of his works are in museumcollections that he has avoided a glut. And ever since the deathslast year of painters Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, collectorssearching for another senior statesman have started giving hiswork a closer look.

Collectors are paying a particular premium for Mr. Richter'slarger abstracts from the late 1980s, which have all the visualimpact of a work by Francis Bacon or Mr. Rothko, artists whoseprices spiked before the recession. These abstracts are alsoimmediately identifiable as being Mr. Richter's creations,making them easy status symbols. San Francisco dealerAnthony Meier says, "Collectors want an iconic work in a formatthat everyone recognizes. Monkey see, monkey do."

Mr. Richter, 80 years old, isn't a household name in the U.S.yet, but he's revered in Europe. Born in Dresden, he fled theformer East Germany months before the Berlin Wall went up.He has spent the past six decades experimenting with ways torefresh traditional painting categories like the still life. He's bestknown for haunting family portraits that evoke smudgednewspaper clippings—a wry response to Pop that won him apre-eminent spot among Europe's postwar painters. He alsouses an oversized squeegee the size of a car bumper to createlayered abstracts. That he flits between several painting styles,rather than sticking to one signature look, has alwaysconfounded some audiences, yet the toggling is actually hiscalling card, the painter as polymath.

A blockbuster retrospective, "Gerhard Richter: Panorama," hasbeen crisscrossing the art capitals of Europe, having justtraveled from London's Tate Modern to Berlin's NeueNationalgalerie, where it will show through May 13. So far, theshow has drawn large crowds; it heads to Paris's Centre

Pompidou in June.

For his part, Mr. Richter seems a reluctant commodity. At a time when superstar artists typically have a differentdealer for every continent, he funnels nearly all his new works through New York dealer Marian Goodman. Bothare soft-spoken and rarely attend high-profile auctions. The pair has declined lucrative licensing deals andprivate commissions. For years, their combined efforts have helped his price levels retain an air of integrity. Ms.Goodman, speaking on behalf of the artist, who declined to be interviewed himself, said, "He has an honestmarket."

Not everyone is ready to bet on Mr. Richter. Jose Mugrabi andDavid Nahmad, major dealers in Warhol and Picasso,respectively, said they don't think Mr. Richter has enough heftto compete with the market presence of those modern masters.Mr. Mugrabi said Mr. Richter's art is more fashionable nowthan it used to be, but not more important.

Trends in contemporary art, as in fashion, can also changequickly, so it's unclear whether Mr. Richter's prices will keepclimbing or drop again over the long run. In the late 1980s,


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Gerhard Richter 2012

Mr. Richter has created more than 3,000 paintings,but nearly 40% of them (including 'Betty,' picturedhere) are in museum collections, which has preventeda market glut.

Sotheby's

Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich is among theinfluential collectors who have helped to make Mr.Richter's market. Mr. Abramovich paid $15.1 millionfor Mr. Richter's 1990 'Abstract Painting' at Sotheby's.

Sotheby's

Part of Mr. Richter's appeal to collectors: He paints ina wide range of styles, from colorful abstracts to hazyportraits. His 'Sailors' sold for $13.2 million atSotheby's.

prices for Frank Stella's geometric paintings rose quickly tonearly $4 million before reaching a plateau in 1989 that hehasn't matched at auction since. Mr. Rothko's abstract paintingsalso soared to $72.8 million during the market's last peak in2007, but nothing by him has sold for half as much in the past

couple of years. Art adviser Nicolai Frahm says he's counseling his collector clients to hold off seeking Mr.Richter's works "until his prices equalize."

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, said he thinks suchlofty comparisons to Picasso and Warhol will hold up, though."Richter doesn't want to be the next king, but he has takenpainting farther than just about anyone else," he said.

Richter's RiseMr. Richter works out of a pair of pristine studios in Cologne,including one attached by a garden path to the home he shareswith his third wife, Sabine, and their young son, Moritz. Mr.Richter suffered a stroke a few years ago, but he remains fit andmoves easily, his face framed by a jaunty pair of translucenteyeglasses.

The son of a Dresden schoolteacher, Mr. Richter grew up incommunist East Germany, steeped in the academic rigors of

Soviet Realism. Some of his first jobs included painting murals of cheery workers for the state. In 1959, he sawWestern contemporary art for the first time at an exhibition called Documenta in the German town of Kassel;afterward, he told friends he would have to rethink what he knew about art after seeing Jackson Pollock's drippysplatters and Lucio Fontana's punctured canvases.

Two years later, he and his wife, Ema, enlisted a friend to sneakthem by car into West Berlin so he could study art withoutpolitical constraint. The couple moved to Düsseldorf, and by theend of the summer the Berlin Wall had gone up. He never sawhis parents again.

Over the next decade, the artist grappled with occasionalhomesickness—and the legacy of his country's role in thewar—by painting portraits of his relatives that looked like black-and-white photographs, only hazy. The subjects included his"Aunt Marianne," who was exterminated by the Nazis becauseshe was mentally ill, and his "Uncle Rudi," a Nazi soldier whodied fighting in the war.

Rudolf Zwirner, one of the artist's earliest dealers, wasimpressed when he saw the work in 1962; few German artists were addressing such disquieting topics. For yearsafter the war, wealthy American collectors who were championing Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol consideredGerman art "taboo," Mr. Zwirner said, so he and other dealers cultivated collectors for Mr. Richter nearby. Theirprices rarely topped $1,000. "I sold Richters to my physician, my neighbors, my brother—anybody I couldconvince," he said. To this day, it's not unusual for bourgeois families in the region to own dozens of works bythe artist; one collector in Munich owns 70 works. By the time Mr. Richter was invited to represent Germany inthe 1972 Venice Biennale, his pool of countrymen collectors was deep.

In the years that followed, Mr. Richter churned through severaldifferent series—like those candles—which didn't sell as well as


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Christie's

Mr. Richter's 1982 'Candle' painting sold in October atChristie's for $16.5 million.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork/Paris

Mr. Richter with his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman

the angst-ridden paintings of his German contemporaries likeAnselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. But in the mid-1980s, hebegan making brightly colored abstracts, and collectorspounced. San Francisco collectors Donald and Doris Fisher,who founded the Gap retail chain, bought several of theseworks.

The real turning point for Mr. Richter came in 1995 when NewYork's Museum of Modern Art paid $3 million for a suite of 15grisaille paintings called "Oct. 18, 1977." The artist painted thiscycle in 1988 as a response to the arrest, trial and grisly death in1977 of a group of young German anarchists-turned-terrorists.Mr. Storr, the Yale dean who then served as the museum'ssenior curator of painting and sculpture, began planning amajor survey of Mr. Richter's work for the museum.

As soon as word leaked about the museum show, Mr. Zwirnersaid his phone started ringing with American collectors seekingRichters. A year later, in 1996, Sotheby's in London put aRichter on the cover of one of its sale catalogs. Back inGermany, longtime collectors started getting letters fromauction houses: Did they care to sell a Richter?

MoMA's long-awaited survey opened six years later, in 2001,and suddenly series that had seemed random when they

debuted, like his "Candle" works, seemed relevant, said Sotheby's specialist Cheyenne Westphal. Three monthsafter the exhibit opened, the auction house sold his "Three Candles" for $5.3 million.

Two years after that, a lawyer and collector based in Zurichnamed Joe Hage began gathering auction prices and exhibitdetails about the works in Mr. Richter's oeuvre. He started awebsite, gerhard-richter.com, and began posting the resultsonline.

For newer, Internet-savvy collectors, Mr. Hage's site has provedpopular because of all that its tallying has revealed. Mr. Richterhas created 3,000 paintings—fewer than Warhol's 8,000silk-screens but considerably more than Salvador Dalí's 1,200works. He's also heavily traded, with more than 200 of hisworks turning up at auction every year, which provides buyerswith a regular stream of price points to analyze. Museums ownroughly 38% of his works, though, including half of his mostcoveted works, those large squeegee abstracts.

By 2006, an influx of newly wealthy collectors began competinghard for contemporary art, spiking values for dozens of artistsincluding Mr. Richter. Sotheby's began shipping its top Richtersto Hong Kong so potential bidders there could see his works. InMay 2006, a bidder at Berlin's Villa Griesbach auction housepaid $1 million for Mr. Richter's 1971 portrait of "Mao." Thefollowing summer, the same painting came up for bid atChristie's in London and sold for $2.5 million.


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© Gerhard Richter, Courtesy The Israel Museum,Jerusalem

Mr. Richter's 1997 'Abstract Painting,' which Lily Safrabought for $20.8 million at Sotheby's.

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Then came the snowball: In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty, sold her 1983 "Candle" for $15.8million, triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's. Three months later, Mr. Abramovich dropped $15.1 million forMr. Richter's green-gray "Abstract Painting" from 1990. It was only priced to sell for up to $7 million. With that,collectors recalibrated Mr. Richter's high bar to $15 million or more.

During the recession that followed, potential sellers of Mr.Richter's masterworks largely sat on the sidelines, but by late2010, as the market perked up again, a fresh set of collectorsbegan embellishing their collections with Richters. ThatNovember, Sotheby's got $13.2 million for his 1966 "Sailors," awork that spent years in the New Museum Weserburg inBremen. The buyers were Houston hedge-fund manager JohnArnold and his wife, Laura.

A pivotal sale four months ago sealed the deal. At Sotheby's inNew York, London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock offeredup eight Richter abstracts; all sold for well over their askingprices, including the abstract that went to Ms. Safra for $20.8million. Last month in London, collectors came back for more:

Christie's got $15.5 million for a green Richter abstract, while Sotheby's sold a creamy abstract to a formerZurich nightclub owner, Carl Hirschmann, for $4.8 million.

Mr. Richter has told friends he thinks his recent auction records are "absurd." But for his longtime collectors,they're paying dividends.

A few years ago, as Berlin endocrinologist Thomas Olbricht was constructing a five-story museum to showcasehis art collection, he realized he was running low on cash. So he sold a blue-orange Richter abstract. Mr. Olbrichthad paid about $287,000 for it in 1996; Christie's sold it for him in 2008 for $14.8 million.

Today, the museum, called the Me Collectors Room, rises from a narrow street in Berlin's bustling Mitteneighborhood. "I still wish I'd been able to keep that painting," Mr. Olbricht said. "Today, it would be worth $20million."

Write to Kelly Crow at [email protected]

A version of this article appeared Mar. 9, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal,with the headline: The Top-Selling Living Artist.


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