Abstraktes Bild (1994)

Four canvases, one number

Richter gives each of his catalogued paintings a number. In 1994 he made a group of four large abstract paintings, each roughly 225 by 200 centimeters, and gave them the catalogue number 809 with suffixes 1 through 4. This painting is 809-4. Its reverse carries the inscription '809-4 Richter 1994'.

The four were first exhibited together in London in the summer of 1995, in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties, organized by a London dealer. One of them, 809-3, is now owned jointly by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The other three went to the Berlin collectors Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, and in 2001 all three passed to the guitarist Eric Clapton.

809-4 is a painting of saturated primaries. The 2022 sale catalog describes deep reds, golden yellows and sapphire blues rising through the surface, an almost acidic green balanced by a flaming red layer that shimmers through, thick impasto beside veils of paint so thin the weave of the canvas shows.

A painter from two Germanys

Richter was born in Dresden on February 9, 1932, and trained at the Dresden art academy, where in the 1950s he painted state-commissioned murals in East Germany. With his wife Marianne, he escaped to West Germany two months before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Both of his Dresden murals were then painted over for ideological reasons.

In Düsseldorf he studied under Karl Otto Götz alongside Sigmar Polke and others, and with Polke and Konrad Lueg he coined the term Capitalist Realism. He became known for blurred paintings made from photographs, then for abstract pictures that run in parallel with them for the rest of his career. He took part in Documenta in 1972, 1982, 1987, 1992 and 1997.

From the mid-1980s he began to use a homemade squeegee to drag and scrape bands of paint across his canvases, layering, removing and layering again. In the 1990s he began to run the squeegee up and down the canvas in a more ordered way, producing vertical columns. Richter has described the process as a game that turns serious: "At the beginning, I feel totally free, and it's fun, like being a child," he told an interviewer in 2002. "In the end, you become like a chess player... Finally, one day I enter the room and say, 'Checkmate.'"

1994: a run of triumphs

The 809 group came at a high point. Richter had just had career-defining retrospectives in 1991 and 1993-94, and the 1995 London show where these paintings debuted was, in the words of a later sale essay, a critical and commercial triumph, with works going to museums on four continents.

His private life was changing too. In 1994 he painted Lesende, a portrait of the artist Sabine Moritz reading a magazine; he married her in 1995. He received the Wolf Prize for 1994-95.

Collectors outside the art world were paying attention. Eric Clapton, a rock guitarist known for Cream, the Yardbirds and a long solo career, bought three of the four 809 paintings at auction in New York in November 2001 from the Pietzsch collection.

Dealer, collectors, a guitarist and two records

The painting's recorded path is short and well documented: from a London gallery to Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch in Berlin, who lent it to an exhibition of contemporary art from a Berlin private collection in Moscow in 1997 and to a show of their collection at the Residenzschloss in Dresden in 2000. The Pietzsch sale took place at auction in New York on November 14, 2001, and Clapton bought it there.

What Clapton paid is reported differently. One account says he paid £2.1 million for this painting alone; another says he bought three major Richters in 2001 for around £2 million; a third gives €2.6 million for all three. No source gives a dollar figure.

In October 2012, during London's autumn art fair week, Clapton sent 809-4 to auction in London with an estimate of £9 million to £12 million. After five minutes of bidding it sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £21,321,250, reported as $34.2 million. That beat the $28.6 million paid in 2010 for a Jasper Johns Flag and set a new auction record for the work of any living artist. It also beat Richter's own record, set that May at £13.5 million.

Clapton later sold a second painting from the group, 809-1, at auction in New York on November 12, 2013, for $20,885,000, and in November 2016 offered the last of his three, described as the second canvas of the series, in New York with an estimate in the region of $20 million.

809-4 returned to auction in New York on May 10, 2022, as the lead lot of an evening sale of 21st-century art, offered with its estimate available only on request. It sold for $36,500,000, according to the sale's published results.

How to identify 809-4

Three things identify the painting: its number, 809-4, inscribed on the reverse with the signature and date; its size, 225 by 200 centimeters, nearly seven feet on each side; and its record in the catalogues raisonnés, the 2005 volume covering 1993 to 2004 (p. 271) and the 2019 volume covering 1994 to 2006 (pp. 74-75).

Because Richter made four paintings of the same size and number in 1994, the suffix matters. 809-1 is a painting in autumn colors, scarlet, emerald green, gold and lemon yellow with spots of violet and Prussian blue. 809-4 is dominated by red, yellow and blue with a strong green. 809-3 is in a public collection in Britain.

The surface shows the squeegee at work: broad sweeps of pulled color, interrupted by thin furrows dragged with a sharp tool through wet paint, and zones where lower layers break through the upper ones.

The painting that set the living-artist bar

The 2012 sale made 809-4 a reference point for the market in living artists, and for Richter's abstractions in particular. Coverage at the time noted that Richter's works sold at auction in 2011 had totaled more than those of any other living artist.

Not everyone applauded. One prominent critic argued at the time that the wrong Richter had been crowned, and that his blurred photo-based series 18. Oktober 1977 mattered far more than a vivid abstraction. Others answered that the abstractions extend the same questions about surface and perception as the blurred photo paintings.

Contemporary coverage ranked the 2022 price as the third highest paid at auction for a Richter at that time, and noted that, adjusted for inflation, it fell short of the 2012 figure. Richter turned 90 three months before that sale.

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

88 5/8 x 78 3/4 in. (225 x 200 cm)

Catalogue raisonné

No. 809-4 (Zweite, 1993-2004, Düsseldorf 2005, p. 271; Elger, vol. 5, 1994-2006, Berlin 2019, pp. 74-75)

Current owner

Private collection; buyer at the May 2022 sale not disclosed

Timeline

1. Feb 9, 1932

   Gerhard Richter is born in Dresden, Germany.

2. 1961

   Richter and his wife escape from East to West Germany two months before the Berlin Wall is built.

3. 1982

   Richter takes part in Documenta 7 in Kassel.

4. 1994

   Richter paints the four abstract canvases numbered 809-1 to 809-4.

5. Jun 1995

   809-4 is first exhibited in London in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties (June-August 1995).

6. Sep 1997

   Lent by Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch to an exhibition in Moscow.

7. 2000

   Shown in the Pietzsch collection exhibition at the Residenzschloss in Dresden.

8. Nov 14, 2001

   The Pietzsch collection is sold at auction in New York; Eric Clapton buys three of the 809 paintings, including 809-4.

9. 2005

   Listed as no. 809-4 in the catalogue raisonné for 1993-2004.

10. Oct 12, 2012

    Sells at auction in London for £21.3 million ($34.2 million), a record for any living artist.

11. Nov 12, 2013

    Its sibling 809-1, also from Clapton, sells at auction in New York for $20,885,000.

12. Nov 15, 2016

    The last of Clapton's three paintings from the group is offered at auction in New York.

13. 2019

    Published in volume 5 of the catalogue raisonné (1994-2006), pp. 74-75.

14. May 10, 2022

    Sells at auction in New York for $36.5 million.

The world in 1994

• Mar 21, 1994

  Schindler's List wins seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

• Apr 27, 1994

  South Africa holds its first fully multiracial elections; Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as president on May 10.

• May 6, 1994

  The Channel Tunnel officially opens between England and France.

• Jun 17, 1994

  The FIFA World Cup opens in the United States.

• Jul 5, 1994

  Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.

• Aug 31, 1994

  The Provisional IRA announces a cessation of military operations, and the Russian Army leaves Estonia and Latvia.

• Dec 3, 1994

  Sony releases the PlayStation in Japan.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Abstraktes Bild (1994) is number 16 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (16 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Eric Clapton owned three of the four 809 paintings; the fourth, 809-3, belongs jointly to Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.
• The 2012 sale took five minutes and nearly doubled the high estimate.
• When it sold in 2012, 809-4 beat the living-artist auction record held by a Jasper Johns Flag.
• Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat both showed at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982.
• Richter has compared finishing an abstract painting to winning at chess: one day he walks into the room and says 'Checkmate.'
• In 2007 Richter designed a stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral made of 11,500 squares in 72 colors, arranged at random by computer.