Abstraktes Bild (636)

One painting, two canvases

Abstraktes Bild (636) is a diptych: two canvases, each about 260 by 200 centimeters, joined side by side into a single picture more than eight feet high and thirteen feet wide. Richter worked on both canvases at once, pulling paint across the seam, so the two halves read as one surface. A passage of white even skips slightly where it crosses the hinge between them.

A black central space anchors the composition. Around it, the 2023 sale catalog lists strawberry red, acid yellow, cerulean, turquoise and lime green, with vertical and horizontal striations and a spatter of sunshine yellow and midnight blue. The 2018 catalog saw chartreuse, electric yellow and vermilion, punctuated with indigo, violet and emerald, and an eruption of white anchoring the join.

The marks record Richter's body. His squeegees, sometimes larger than he was, were dragged with his full weight from the upper left toward the lower right; each pass laid down new color while scraping up the layers beneath. Richter called the role of chance in this process essential: "the moment of chance is very important," he said, and "it is guided and used."

The squeegee year

Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, fled East Germany for the West in 1961, two months before the Berlin Wall went up. Through the 1960s and 1970s he made his name with blurred paintings based on photographs, while also making abstract pictures. From 1980 to 1985 his abstractions were built from bold, wide brushmarks.

1986 was the turning point. That year his first large touring retrospective, Paintings 1962-1985, traveled to Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bern and Vienna, and he took up the squeegee as his main compositional tool, giving up planned forms in favor of the unpredictable scrape. The 2023 catalog notes that 636 was painted only one year after the squeegee entered his abstract work.

The work of 1986 to 1989 is widely considered the high point of his abstract painting. Richter wrote in 1986 that he was "a materialist on principle," and that nature, too, "does not develop an organism in accordance with an idea" but "lets its forms and modifications come." In 1987 he also took part in Documenta 8 in Kassel.

Painting when painting was declared dead

Richter painted 636 at a time when many critics argued that painting had run its course. The 2023 sale essay frames his abstractions as an answer: freed from any single ideology, he let the materials and chance lead. "Art is the highest form of hope," he said.

Interest in his work in the United States was rising through the decade, and 636 traveled there almost at once. After a showing at a Paris gallery in 1988, it was included in the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from November 1988 to January 1989, where its catalog entry called it 636 Untitled.

Of comparable size, only one other Abstraktes Bild from 1987 exists, according to the 2023 catalog; it belongs to the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon. Similar large abstractions of the period are in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others.

Thirty years on one wall, then five years to the day

A private collector bought the painting from a Paris gallery in 1988, shortly after it was made, and kept it for three decades. During that time it was catalogued in Richter's 1993 overview of his work and in the 2013 catalogue raisonné volume covering 1976 to 1987 (p. 591), and discussed in the catalog of the 2011 Tate Modern retrospective Gerhard Richter: Panorama.

It first came to auction in New York on November 14, 2018, offered with its estimate available only on request. It sold for $32 million, the most valuable lot of that evening. The seller's catalog called it one of only five works by Richter measuring over 102 by 157 inches still in private hands.

Exactly five years later, on November 14, 2023, it was offered again in New York, carrying a guarantee and, by one report, a low estimate of $30 million. It sold for $34.8 million to a collector based in Asia, about 8.75 percent above its 2018 price. It was the most valuable lot of the evening and of the selling firm's year.

How to identify 636

The number is the key. The left panel is signed, inscribed and dated '636 Richter 1987' on the reverse; the right panel is inscribed '636'. Richter's catalogue raisonné lists the painting as no. 636.

Measurements are reported slightly differently: the 2023 catalog gives each panel as 260.4 by 200.3 centimeters and the whole as 260.4 by 400.7 centimeters, while the 2018 catalog gives 260 by 200.3 and 260 by 401 centimeters.

Rarity claims vary with how size is defined. In 2018 it was called one of five privately held works over 102 by 157 inches. A 2023 press release for a different 1986 painting counted 24 Abstrakte Bilder wider than 380 centimeters, half of them in museums. The 2018 catalog essay also dates its Carnegie International showing to 1998 in one passage, while its exhibition list gives 1988-89, which matches the rest of the record.

Among Richter's top results

At $34.8 million, 636 ranks among Richter's highest auction prices. The firm that sold it in 2023 placed it among the top five works by Richter ever offered at auction. His auction record belongs to a closely related monumental painting, an Abstraktes Bild of 1986, sold in London in 2015 for £30.2 million ($46.3 million).

The 2023 buyer was a collector based in Asia. Richter abstractions had already drawn strong bidding there: in October 2020 another Richter abstract sold at auction in Hong Kong for HK$214 million ($27.7 million), at the time a record for a Western artwork at auction in Asia.

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas, in two parts

Dimensions

Overall 102 1/2 x 157 3/4 in. (260.4 x 400.7 cm); each panel 102 1/2 x 78 7/8 in. (260.4 x 200.3 cm)

Catalogue raisonné

No. 636 (Werkübersicht 1962-1993, Bern 1993; Elger, vol. 3, 1976-1987, Ostfildern 2013, p. 591)

Current owner

Private collection; bought in 2023 by a collector based in Asia

Timeline

1. Feb 9, 1932

   Gerhard Richter is born in Dresden, Germany.

2. 1961

   Richter escapes to West Germany two months before the Berlin Wall is built.

3. 1986

   First large touring retrospective (Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bern, Vienna); the squeegee becomes his principal tool.

4. 1986

   Richter writes in his notes that he is 'a materialist on principle.'

5. 1987

   Richter paints Abstraktes Bild (636), a two-panel canvas over 13 feet wide, and takes part in Documenta 8.

6. 1988

   Shown at a Paris gallery and bought by a private collector.

7. Nov 1988

   Exhibited at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (November 1988-January 1989) as 636 Untitled.

8. 1993

   Listed as no. 636 in Richter's catalogue raisonné for 1962-1993.

9. 2011

   Discussed in the catalog of the Tate Modern retrospective Gerhard Richter: Panorama.

10. 2013

    Published in the catalogue raisonné volume for 1976-1987, p. 591.

11. Nov 14, 2018

    Sells at auction in New York for $32 million after thirty years in one collection.

12. Nov 14, 2023

    Sells at auction in New York for $34.8 million to a collector based in Asia.

The world in 1987

• Feb 1987

  Andy Warhol dies.

• Mar 6, 1987

  The ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes off Zeebrugge, Belgium; 193 people die.

• Apr 19, 1987

  The Simpsons first appear as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show.

• May 28, 1987

  Eighteen-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust evades Soviet air defenses and lands a small plane on Red Square.

• Jun 12, 1987

  In Berlin, President Ronald Reagan challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

• Oct 19, 1987

  Black Monday: stock markets fall sharply on Wall Street and around the world.

• Dec 8, 1987

  Reagan and Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington.

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 (636) is number 17 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 (17 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The painting sold at auction on November 14, 2018 and again on November 14, 2023, five years to the day apart.
• Before 2018 it had stayed with the collector who bought it from the artist's Paris dealers in 1988, a span of thirty years.
• Its first museum appearance, at the 1988 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, listed it as 636 Untitled.
• Richter painted both canvases at the same time, dragging paint across the gap between them.
• Richter's squeegees were sometimes larger than he was, and he put his full body weight behind them.
• The 2023 price was about 8.75 percent higher than the 2018 price.
• Richter's auction record belongs to another monumental Abstraktes Bild, painted in 1986, which sold in London in 2015 for £30.2 million ($46.3 million).