Gerhard Richter - the top ranking of living artists by turnover
Who is Gerhard Richter, and why it can rightly be called one of the most successful living artist - in the article Kelly Crow, Wall Street Journal
In the early 1980s German artist Gerhard Richter (Gerhard Richter) wrote 24 still life with flickering white candles, but could not sell a single one. And last fall at London's Christie's auction for one of these still-lifes paid 16.5 million dollars.
Few can pinpoint the moment when the artist becomes a classic series with Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, but now, it seems, the art community is willing to give it the title of Gerhard Richter. Based on the statistics website Artnet, in the last year Richter's work at auction brought a total of $ 200 million - more than any other works of living artists. Annual Richter result has exceeded even the amount of annual turnover of such titans of the art market, as Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, and Mark Rothko . In Richter Gallery in New York, dozens of families are on the list who want to buy one of his new works, which cost anywhere from 3 million dollars apiece.
in November at Sotheby's London-based collector of Lily Safra (Lily Safra) paid 20.8 million dollars for the" abstract painting "1997 eggplant color - current personal record Richter. Some of the Jeff Koons and Jasper Johns sold more expensive, but on the general terms of sales, Mr. Richter is definitely a market leader in living artists.
interest to the German artist is not heated only the market demand, but also active measures curators: auction houses and museums that can not wait to canonize another master, showing work in increasing the Richter scale. Numerous collectors and art dealers, including such a trendsetter in the art market as a novel Abramovich, Bernard Arnault, Pierre Chan Larry Gagosian and Steve Cohen, a moment to catch a bargain or sale of works by Gerhard Richter.
Works Richter certainly meet the tastes of the modern art market. Like and Picasso, he paints pictures in different styles - from abstractions to the rainbow touching family portraits - and thus collectors to choose from. Richter as prolific as Warhol, which provides a constant flow of new works on the market, however, many of his works have ended up in museum collections, thus avoiding saturation of the market. And after last year, one by one, departed this life esteemed colleagues Cy Twombly, and Richter Lusien Freud, collectors have a great respect for creativity that is now living patriarch of the modern of art.
Collectors especially appreciate the large abstraction Richter late 1980s, in which was influenced by Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko - authors whose price indexes have risen sharply before the crisis. These abstractions instantly recognized the hand of their creator, which translates them into the category of work status. "Collectors want to own paradigmatic work that can not be confused with anything", - said the dealer from San Francisco, Anthony Meyer (Anthony Meier).
So far, the name of the 80-year-old German artist Gerhard Richter is not known to every American family, but in Europe it is in great esteem. The last sixty years of his artistic career, he constantly tries to bring something new to the capabilities of traditional painting genres such as still life, and their perception. The most famous series are his ghostly Richter family portraits, which resemble smeared with newspaper clippings. This is an ironic response to Pop Art glorified Richter among European postwar artists. It also uses huge, the size of a car bumper, scrapers, to create multi-layered abstract paintings. The fact that Richter can easily jump from one style to another painting, but once chosen does not adhere to a corporate image that has always bothered anyone, but this ability to switch and become a hallmark of the end of this artist-scholar.
Large-scale retrospective of the "Gerhard Richter: Panorama" currently travels to the capitals of Europe: it is only recently moved from London's Tate Modern in Berlin New National Gallery, which runs until May 13, 2012. In taking a retrospective museum yet besieged by visitors, in June of Richter will be taken to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
But Gerhard Richter did not seem too happy fell down on his fame. Typically, first-magnitude star to sell their works to keep the art dealer in each of the continents at the same Richter in the state listed only one vendor - a New York dealer Marian Goodman (Marian Goodman). They are both [Richter and Goodman] - demure and walkers on bustling auction sites. The pair refused lucrative licensing deals and special orders. For years, their combined efforts helped to keep prices for works of Richter's integrity. Marian Goodman, was interviewed on behalf of the artist, called his work the market "fair».
| Candle. 1982 Sold in November 2011 at Christie's for 16.5 million dollars Source: | Source: |
However, not everyone is ready to bet on the Richter. The main sellers of Warhol and Picasso - Jose Mughrabi (Jose Mugrabi) and David Nahmad (David Nahmad) - believe that Richter can not yet on the market with these two heavyweights. Mughrabi said that the art of Richter's now more fashionable than ever before, but it does not become more important.
trends in contemporary art as well as in fashion, tend to change rapidly, therefore, it is not clear whether prices will continue to work on the Richter grow or they will fall by more or less prolonged period of time. Thus, in the late 1980s the price of paintings by Frank Stella geometric suddenly rose to nearly $ 4 million, the peak rise in prices took place in 1989, but no work since then has not sold more. Another example is Mark Rothko: the price of his abstraction skyrocketed during the last art boom in 2007, reaching a record $ 72.8 million dollars. However, over the past two years, Rothko's paintings at auction, and not up to the middle of this record bars. Art consultant Nicholas Frahm (Nicolai Frahm) said that while advises its customers to refrain from chasing Richter works - as long as prices do not align.
Whatever it was, Dean of the Yale School of Art, Robert Storr (Robert Storr) finds that flattering comparisons with Picasso and Richter Warhol still hold out in the minds of people. "Richter wants to be the new king, but he has done for art far more than any of his colleagues," - says Storr.
Richter works in one of his two older workshops in Cologne. One of his studios combined footpath through the garden to the house where the artist lives with his third wife, Sabine Moritz, and youngest son. Several years ago, the artist suffered a stroke, but it's still in shape and easy to move, the nose is always flaunt his stylish glasses.
Richter was born in 1932 in the home school teacher in Dresden. His emergence as an artist took place in communist East Germany, pogryaznuvshey in the academic rigor of social realism. Among his first works were, in particular, painted with a white-toothed workers, made by order of the state. In 1959, Richter first became acquainted with the modern Western art in the exhibition Documenta in the German city of Kassel after he personally saw "drippingi" Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana cut through canvas, he told friends that now he will have to rethink what he knew about art .
In 1961, Gerhard and his wife Emma on the other car escaped to West Germany. Now he could study art beyond political ideologies. Richter settled in Dusseldorf. In the late summer of the same in 1961 was erected the Berlin Wall. The artist was not able to see more of their parents.
next ten years, the artist, having experienced the tides of nostalgia, from time to time, he painted portraits of his relatives, similar to black and white blurred photographs. The heroes of his portraits became Aunt Marianne, who suffered from mental disorders and murdered by the Nazis, and Uncle Rudy, who fought on the side of most of these Nazis.
One of the first dealers Rudolf Richter Tsvirner (Rudolf Zwirner) was shocked to see his work in 1962, few German artists then dared address such sensitive topics. For many years after the war, American collectors prefer their Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, German art has been closed to them, so Tsvirneru and other German dealers had to turn out on-site clientele. Then the price of the product Richter rarely exceeded one thousand dollars. "I was selling his work to his doctor, his neighbors, his brother - to anyone who could persuade" - says Tsvirner. So far in these parts of Germany there are the bourgeois family, who own dozens of works by Gerhard Richter, one collector from Munich, for example, to seventy. By 1972, when Richter was invited to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, the artist was already a lot of fans among provincial German collectors.
In subsequent years, he created several series of different techniques - like the one series still life with candles, which initially was not a success as well as paintings and filled with nostalgia German colleagues Richter Anselm Kiefer (Anselm Kiefer) and Georg Baselitz (Georg Baselitz). However, in the mid-1980s Gerhard moved to its colorful abstraction - and collectors "flocked" to them like bees to honey. Donald and Doris Fisher in San Francisco, founded the retail chain Gap, at the same time bought a number of Richter, "abstract paintings».
real turning point was the 1995-th, when New York's MoMA acquired for $ 3 million series of Richter's "October 18, 1977" of the fifteen paintings in shades of gray. In this series, written by Richter in the late 1980s, the artist plays published in the press photos of the judicial investigation and the death in prison, a group of young radicals from the German Red Army Faction. Robert Storr, then occupied in the Museum of Modern Art as senior curator of painting and sculpture, after this purchase for the museum planned to carry out large-scale study of creativity Richter.
Once in New York mentioned to the upcoming exhibition of Richter's phone dealer Tsvirnera began to burst from the phone calls of American collectors eager to buy his work. A year later, in 1996, the auction house Sotheby's put one of the paintings on the cover of their Richter in London trading. And in Germany on the old Richter collectors showered letters from auction houses, with proposals to put their works up for auction.
long-awaited retrospective at MoMA opened only six years later, in 2001. "And it turned out that those series that were previously considered disordered creative experiments (such as a series of still lifes unsuccessfully debuted with candles), were in fact functioning as a single chain," - says the employee of Sotheby's Cheyenne Westphal (Cheyenne Westphal). Three months after the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art at Sotheby's auction painting "Three Candles" went for $ 5.3 million.
Two years after the sale of the Zurich lawyer and collector Joe Heydzh (Joe Hage) created a website gerhard-richter.com , where he began to collect information about exhibitions and sales of works of Richter. For the new generation of collectors, who with the Internet "you", Mr. Heydzha site was very useful, since all calculations are obvious. Total Richter wrote three thousand pictures - it is certainly less than eight thousand Andy Warhol silk-screen printing, however, considerably more than 1200 paintings of Salvador Dali. Richter's work is actively sold at auction: every year at the auction gets an average of over two hundred of his works, which gives consumers information on the status of regular market prices Richter. In museum collections there are about 38 percent of the work Richter, but it is among them is half of the most sought after paintings by the master - his multi-layered abstractions.
By 2006 the art market, a huge number of new collectors who came there for contemporary art. This led to a rapid increase in the price of the product of dozens of artists, including Richter. Sotheby's has started to send their best, "Richter" in Hong Kong so that they could see the potential buyers. In May 2006, at Berlin's bid Villa Griesbach client has paid one million dollars for "Portrait of Mao" brush Richter. And next summer, this same picture was sold at Christie's in London for 2.5 million dollars.
Then prices are already growing like a snowball in February 2008, the eldest daughter of the artist Betty sold belonged to her, "Candle" in 1983 for 15.8 million dollars. Three months later, Roman Abramovich laid out $ 15.1 million for the gray-green "abstract painting" in 1990. Evaluated it in only 7 million. After these sales, collectors have raised the bar for Richter works up to 15 million and above.
| abstract painting. 1990 Source: |  Gerhard Richter sailors. 1966 Source: |
During the crisis, collectors held back his masterpieces Richter, but by the end of 2010, when the market is already quite oklemalsya, buying and selling boiled with renewed vigor, and many new collectors have since already adorn their collections works of Richter. In November 2010 at Sotheby's for 13.2 million dollars was sold painting "sailors" in 1966. work put Bremen Weserburg Museum of Modern Art . Houston became the new owner of the hedge fund manager John Arnold (John Arnold).
Finally, one of the last works of Richter's key sales occurred in November 2011. London collectors, Mark and Victoria Sarsok (Marc and Victoria Sursock) exhibited at the New York Sotheby's auction eight of abstractions, each of them played much better than the appraised value, including "An abstract painting," Lily Safra bought for 20.8 million dollars.
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