Abstraktes Bild (797-2)

A picture nobody planned

Abstraktes Bild (797-2) is a square oil painting, 240 by 240 centimeters, that Gerhard Richter signed, dated 1993 and numbered 797-2 on the back. The number is the painting's address in Richter's own catalogue, where works are listed by number and sub-number. In that catalogue it sits among a run of large squares from the same months, and the curator Mark Godfrey describes it as one of seven large square paintings made in 1993 that share the same spectrum of strong and dark reds, greens and blues.

The painting was made almost entirely with a squeegee. Richter had begun using squeegees in the late 1970s alongside brushes, palette knives, tape and rollers, and later built his own: long wooden or metal bars with handholds and flexible neoprene strips. The first paintings finished entirely with squeegee drags came in the mid-1980s; by 1993 he had been working this way for about eight years.

His method was to cover the canvas with brushed paint in layers applied at different times, then cancel those gestures by dragging the squeegee across the surface, vertically and horizontally, in several passes. Each pass revealed some earlier layers and buried others. Godfrey notes that Richter could not foresee which colors would stay where, so features such as the blue in the lower left corner and the band of green toward the right could not have been planned. Richter sometimes returned with a knife to scrape across the grain of the drags, and stopped when the painting reached a point where nothing more could be done.

Richter described the goal in a 1990 interview: "I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture."

From Dresden to Cologne

Richter was born in Dresden on February 9, 1932, and trained at the Dresden Art Academy, where from 1957 to 1961 he worked as a master trainee and painted murals and commissions for the East German state. With his wife Marianne he left for West Germany in 1961, two months before the Berlin Wall went up; his murals in Dresden were later painted over for ideological reasons.

In the West he studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf alongside Sigmar Polke, with whom he coined the term Capitalist Realism. He returned to the academy as a professor in 1971 and taught there for more than 15 years, and in 1983 he moved from Dusseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works.

Abstraction ran through his career long before the squeegee. In 1968 he made 23 small panels, each testing a different mode of abstract painting; in the early 1970s came gray monochromes, the Red-Blue-Yellow series and the chance-ordered Color Charts; and in 1976 he began the series he called Abstrakte Bilder. Godfrey points out that Richter was in his sixties when he made 797-2 and that the squeegee is heavy: a pause halfway through a drag could leave a ridge of paint, so his body is recorded in the surface in a new way.

The year he painted 797-2, Richter also received a major touring retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993, curated by Kasper Konig, with 130 works and a three-volume catalogue.

Perth, Sydney and a Manhattan divorce

The painting's recorded ownership begins with a New York gallery, then passes to James Erskine of Sydney and to a second New York gallery, from which Harry and Linda Macklowe acquired it in July 2005. It was illustrated in a London exhibition catalogue in 1998, and in Australia it was shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth (August 1998 to May 2000), at the 4th Biennial Australian Performing Arts Market in Adelaide (February to March 2000) and at the 12th Biennale of Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art (May to July 2000).

Harry Macklowe, a New York real estate developer, married Linda Burg on January 4, 1959. Over five decades the couple built a collection of postwar and contemporary art; one dealer who sold Linda many of the works said she was the main collector of the two. Linda filed for divorce in 2016, and after a contentious proceeding the court ordered the collection sold at auction.

Richter's 797-2 was lot 22 of 35 in the first sale, held in New York on the evening of November 15, 2021, with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million. Before the sale the works traveled to Taipei, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London and Paris. Both former spouses attended; Linda, who had fought to keep the works from auction, watched from a skybox.

Bidding was especially vigorous for the Richter, which sold for $33 million with fees, recorded as $33,010,500, above its high estimate. One market report says the buyer was a private collector in London; the buyer has not been publicly named. Asian bidders also pursued Richter that night. All 35 lots sold, for a total of $676.1 million, which the auction house's executive called the most valuable single-owner auction ever staged.

What makes it 797-2

The painting is identified by its catalogue number, 797-2, written by the artist on the reverse with his signature and the date 1993. It appears as no. 797-2 in the 2005 catalogue of Richter's work from 1993 to 2004 and in volume IV of Dietmar Elger's catalogue raisonne covering 1988 to 1994, published in 2015, at pages 556-57.

Visually it is dominated by bursts of crimson and scarlet against dusky greens and blues rising from beneath, with flashes of yellow barely visible under skeins of red and blue. The sale catalogue points to whites on deep crimson at upper left and lime under umber toward lower right, and to scrapes and incisions running in several directions across the drags.

Its siblings are scattered. The catalogue for the sale shows related 1993 squares numbered 793 through 798, including four Grun-Blau paintings (793-1 to 793-4) in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and 798-2 in the Seattle Art Museum; 797-1, 798-1 and 798-3 are in private collections.

Richter at the top of the market

The Abstrakte Bilder, particularly those made after 1988 and finished with a large squeegee, are among the most coveted of all Richter works. In February 2015 his 1986 Abstraktes Bild (599) sold in London for 30.4 million pounds, then his auction record. A sister canvas from the same 1993 group, 798-3, had earlier brought $21.8 million, also a record at the time.

The Macklowe sale itself became a benchmark: it was the biggest test of the top of the art market since the pandemic lockdowns of March 2020, and four works sold for more than $50 million that night. A second Macklowe sale followed on May 16, 2022, and together the two sales topped $922 million.

Corinna Belz's 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting filmed him making squeegee paintings of this kind in his Cologne studio, and a still from it opened the sale catalogue's essay on 797-2.

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

240 x 240 cm (94 1/2 x 94 1/2 in)

Catalogue raisonne

No. 797-2 (Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonne 1988-1994, vol. IV, 2015, pp. 556-57)

Inscriptions

Signed, dated 1993 and numbered 797-2 on the reverse

Current owner

Private; the 2021 buyer has not been publicly named

Timeline

1. Feb 9, 1932

   Gerhard Richter is born in Dresden.

2. Jan 4, 1959

   Harry Macklowe marries Linda Burg.

3. 1961

   Richter and his wife leave East Germany for the West, two months before the Berlin Wall is built.

4. 1971

   Richter returns to the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf as a professor.

5. 1976

   Richter begins the series he calls Abstrakte Bilder.

6. 1983

   Richter moves from Dusseldorf to Cologne.

7. 1993

   Richter paints Abstraktes Bild (797-2), one of seven large squares in the same palette, and receives the touring retrospective Malerei 1962-1993.

8. Aug 1998

   The painting goes on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, through May 2000.

9. May 2000

   It is shown at the 12th Biennale of Sydney.

10. Jul 2005

    Harry and Linda Macklowe acquire the painting.

11. 2015

    Volume IV of Dietmar Elger's catalogue raisonne lists the painting as no. 797-2.

12. 2016

    Linda Macklowe files for divorce.

13. Nov 15, 2021

    The painting sells for $33 million at auction in New York in the court-ordered sale of the Macklowe Collection.

14. May 16, 2022

    The second Macklowe sale is held; the two sales together top $922 million.

The world in 1993

• Jan 1, 1993

  Czechoslovakia dissolves into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

• Jan 20, 1993

  Bill Clinton is inaugurated as US president.

• Feb 26, 1993

  A van bomb explodes beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing six people.

• May 24, 1993

  Eritrea gains independence from Ethiopia.

• Jun 11, 1993

  Jurassic Park opens in US theaters.

• Sep 13, 1993

  Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands in Washington after signing the Oslo I Accord.

• Nov 1, 1993

  The Maastricht Treaty takes effect, formally establishing the European Union.

• Dec 8, 1993

  President Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement into law.

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 (797-2) is number 18 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 (18 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Richter numbers his own works, and 797-2 is that number: the painting is one of a run of large 1993 squares numbered 793 to 798.
• Four of its 1993 siblings, the Grun-Blau paintings 793-1 to 793-4, belong to the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, and 798-2 is in the Seattle Art Museum.
• Before it was sold in New York, the painting spent almost two years on view in Perth, Western Australia, and then appeared at the Biennale of Sydney.
• Richter's squeegees were homemade: long bars with handholds and a flexible neoprene strip, heavy enough that a pause mid-drag left a ridge of paint.
• At the Macklowe sale Linda Macklowe, credited as the lead architect of the collection, watched from a skybox and did not speak to the press.
• Richter has mostly declined licensing deals and private commissions, and he waived his fee for the stained-glass window of 11,500 colored squares he designed for Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in 2007.