Gerhard Richter

Eric Clapton has increased his earnings significantly, but it hasn't had anything to do with his music.
The legendary musician has sold a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter for $34 million at a Sotheby's auction in London. It's believed to be the record price paid for a work completed by a living artist.
Clapton paid just over $3 million for Abstraktes Bild (809-4) in 2001. It's one of a series of four Richter paintings from the 1990s of which Clapton owns three.
Music is close to Richter's heart though, the German having completed artwork for the cover of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation album in 1988.
Clapton uses vast amounts of his wealth to fund a drug and alcohol rehab facility in Antigua.
Daydream Nation is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was recorded between July and August 1988 at Greene St. Recording, New York City, and released in October 1988, through Enigma Records.
Their first official double album, and their last before signing to a major label, 
Daydream Nation was a critical success that earned Sonic Youth substantial acclaim and a major label deal. The album topped the year-end album lists of the NME, CMJ, and Melody Maker, and was placed second on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Several promotional singles were released from the album, the first being "Teen Age Riot", which charted on Billboard's newly created Modern Rock Tracks chart at number 20.
The album is widely considered to be the band's best work, and an influence on the alternative and indie rock genres. It was chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Recording Registry in 2005.

Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus following the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.
Richter is regarded as the top-selling living artist. In October 2012, Richter's Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by a living artist at £21m ($34m).
The son of a schoolteacher, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge) in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948 he finished higher professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, successively worked as an apprentice with a sign painter, a photographer and as a painter. In 1950 his application for membership in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected as "too bourgeois". He finally began his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Heinz Lohmar and Will Grohmann
In the early days of his career, he prepared a wall painting ("Communion with Picasso", 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as part of his B.A. Another mural followed at the Hygiene-Museum (German Hygiene Museum) entitled "Lebensfreude" ("Joy of life"), for his diploma and intended to produce an effect "similar to that of wall paper or tapestry".

Gerhard Richter c. 1970, .

Both paintings were painted over for ideological reasons after Richter escaped from East to West Germany (two months before the building of the Berlin Wall); after German reunification two "windows" of the wall painting Joy of life (1956) were uncovered in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, but these were later covered over when it was decided to restore the Museum to its original 1930 state. From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took orders for the former state of the GDR. During this time, he worked intensively on murals (Arbeiterkampf, which means Worker fight), on oil paintings (e.g. portraits of the East German actress Angelica Domroese and of Richter's first wife Ema), on various self portraits and furthermore, on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild (Townscape, 1956).
When he escaped to West Germany, Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz. With Polke and Lueg he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism) as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism, then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art doctrine of western capitalism. Later, Lueg founded theRichter taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, as a visiting professor, and returned to the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1971, where he was a professor for over 15 years.

In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today.
Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had a son and daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995.

In 2005 Richter, in an interview by the German political magazine Der Spiegel, wondered why citizens of Salzburg did not protest against a sculpture by Markus Lüpertz, and described the work as expressing the deprivation of public art sponsorship in Germany. The sculpture, declared as a homage to Mozart by its creator, was promptly attacked by a right-wing art activist from Austria and badly damaged. The statue depicted a grotesque nude figure with both male and female features and was characterized as pornography by the two elderly men prosecuted for the vandalism during which they painted over it and stuck feathers onto it.

Nearly all of Richter’s work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical activity and material of painting—as mutual interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new attempts to understand—to represent; in his case, to paint—the world surrounding us.

Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: from newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, as in Helga Matura (1966); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, for example Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multi-partite work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale, Forty-eight Portraits (1971–2), for which he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.
Many of these paintings are made in a multi-step process of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur"—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects:

1. It offers the image a photographic appearance; and
2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter's actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself.

In some paintings blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to understand or believe. The subject is nullified. In these paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits, and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world.
Richter has stated  that the use of photographic imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a modernist discourse. To achieve this, Richter began amassing photos from magazines, books, etc., many of which became the subject matter of his early photography-based paintings. Thus the Atlas was born: Atlas is an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels.^[16] When Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum for Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title "Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen," it included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995.
While elements of landscape painting appeared initially in Richter’s work early on in his career in 1963, the artist began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after his first vacation, an excursion that landed him besotted with the terrain of Corsica.^[From around 1964 Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle. Richter's two portraits of Betty, his daughter, were made in 1977 and 1988 respectively; the three portraits titled IG were made in 1993 and depict the artist's second wife, Isa Genzken; Lesende (1994) portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine.^[Many of his realist paintings reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. From 1966, as well as photographs given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits.
In 1975, on the occasion of a show in Düsseldorf, Gilbert and George commissioned Richter to make a portrait of them
Richter began making prints in 1965. He was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time. In the period 1965–74, during which Richter made most of his prints (more than 100), the same or similar subjects often occurred in both his paintings and prints. He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes – screenprint, photolithography, and collotype – in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a "non-art" appearance to his work.
He stopped working in print media in 1974, at about the same time as he gave up painting from found photographs, and began to use photographs he took himself^]
Richter's landscapes have emerged since 1968 as an independent work group in his oeuvre.^[

According to Dietmar Elger, "Richter's landscapes are almost invariably understood in terms of the great historical tradition of German Romantic Painting. They are especially compared to the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). ... The comparison with Friedrich makes excellent sense. Not only is Friedrich foundational to the very notion of German landscape painting, but each artist spent important years of his life in Dresden. Indeed, several critics have concluded that, despite being separated by more than a century, the two share a similar experience of nature."In 1972 Richter had embarked on a ten-day trip to Greenland, originally having intended to be accompanied by his friend Hanne Darboven, but eventually journeying alone. His intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape. In 1976 four large paintings, each titled Seascape emerged from the Greenland photographs.
In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life memento mori painting. Each composition is most commonly based on a photograph taken by Richter in his own studio. Influenced by old master vanitas painters such as Georges de la Tour and Francisco de Zurbarán, the artist began to experiment with arrangements of candles and skulls placed in varying degrees of natural light, sitting atop otherwise barren tables. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works. Richter has made only 27 of these still lifes.
In 1995, the artist marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of his hometown Dresden during the Second World War. His solitary candle was reproduced on a monumental scale and placed overlooking the River Elbe as a symbol of rejuvenation^]
In a 1988 series of 15 ambiguous photo paintings entitled Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977) he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on October 18, 1977, and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy.In the late 1980s, Richter had begun to collect images of the group which he used as the basis for the 15 paintings exhibited for the first time in Krefeld in 1989. The paintings were based on an official portrait of Ulrike Meinhof during her years as a radical journalist; on photographs of the arrest of Holger Meins; on police shots of Gudrun Ensslin in prison; on Andreas Baader's bookshelves and the record player to conceal his gun; on the dead figures of Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader; and on the funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe.
Since 1989, Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging wet paint over photographs. The photographs, not all taken by Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings and streetscapes.
Richter was flying to New York on September 11, 2001, but due to the 9/11 attacks, including on the World Trade Center, his plane was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. A few years later he made one small painting specifically about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. In September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter, Robert Storr situates Richter's 2005 painting "September" within a brand of anti-ideological thought that he finds throughout Richter’s work, he considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of the September 11th attacks affects the uniqueness of one’s distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter’s “October 18, 1977” cycle^]
In the 2000s, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena. In 2003, he produced several paintings with the same title: Silicate. Large oil-on-canvas pieces, these show latticed rows of light- and dark-grey blobs whose shapes quasi-repeat as they race across the frame, their angle modulating from painting to painting. They depict a photo, published in the FAZ, of a computer-generated simulacrum of reflections from the silicon dioxide found in insects' shells.

Abstract work

Coming full-circle from his early Table (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint,in 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.
In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing come, rather than creating it.” In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. From the mid 1980s, Richter began to use a home-made squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks.
Richter’s abstract work is remarkable for the illusion of space that develops, ironically, out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist’s tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.
Firenze continues a cycle of 99 works conceived in the autumn of 1999 and executed in the same year and thereafter. The series of overpainted photographs, or übermalte Photographien, consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians.
After 2000, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena, in particular, with aspects of reality that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
 In 2006, Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title Cage, named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage.In May 2002, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting no. 648-2, from 1987. Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German FAZ newspaper on March 20 and 21. This work was published in 2004 as a book entitled War Cut.
As early as 1966 Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973–4 in a series of large-format pictures such as 256 Colours. Richter painted three series of Color Chart paintings between 1966 and 1974, each series growing more ambitious in their attempt to create through their purely arbitrary arrangement of colors.
The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled 10 Colors. The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series.
Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement.
The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter's second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green.
Richter’s 4900 Colours from 2007 consisted of bright monochrome squares that have been randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create stunning fields of kaleidoscopic color. It was produced at the same time he developed his design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral. 4900 Colours consists of 196 panels in 25 colors that can be reassembled in 11 variations – from a single expansive surface to multiple small-format fields. Richter developed Version II – 49 paintings, each of which measures 97 by 97 centimeters – especially for the Serpentine Gallery.

Cologne Cathedral

Throughout the body of Richter's work one can often observe waves of minimalism appearing only to disappear again. It has been noted that perhaps it may be necessary to view Richter as a conceptual artist wherein his individual pieces point towards a very painterly approach, while possibly this may not be his intent. If one views the progressions in the individual series as single works, a very different concept erupts. While many critics agree that this analysis may be necessary, let us take it one step further: assuming that Richter's small series is analogous to his entire body of work, one sees the same images of realism to blur. For example Eight Grey 2002. It may be considered, thus, that he is interested in the progression, and not in the individual images nor the qualities of paint nor any other medium he uses. In this a new idea of minimalism is born; a minimalism where the material means nothing, however, its use is technically masterful. As was said by Jan Van Eyck in the inscription on the frame of Man in the Red Turban "Als Ich Kann" which are the first words of the proverb "As I can, but not as I would."

Richter first began exhibiting in Düsseldorf in 1963. Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf.
The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter. In part, this comes from his ability to explore the medium at a time when many were heralding its death. Richter has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including the Staatspreis of the State Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2000; the Wexner Prize, 1998; the Praemium Imperiale, Japan, 1997; the Golden Lion of the 47th Biennale, Venice, 1997; the Wolf Prize in Israel in 1994/5; the Kaiserring Prize der Stadt Goslar, Mönchehaus-Museum für Moderne Kunst, Goslar, Germany, 1988; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna, 1985; the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel, 1981; and the Junger Western Art Prize, Germany, 1961. He was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.

He also served as source of inspiration for writers and musicians.  The original, over 7 metres (23 ft) square, is now showcased in Sonic Youth's studio in NYC. Don DeLillo's short story "Looking at Meinhof" describes an encounter between two strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The meeting takes place in the room displaying October 18, 1977 (1988)

Following an exhibition with Blinky Palermo at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in 1971, Richter’s formal arrangement with the dealer came to an end in 1972. Thereafter Friedrich was only entitled to sell the paintings that he had already obtained contractually from Richter. In the following years, Richter showed with Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and Sperone Westwater, New York. Today Richter is represented by Marian Goodman,^[64] his primary dealer since 1985.
Today museums own roughly 38% of Richter's works, including half of his large abstract paintings.
Already by 2004, Richter’s annual turnover was $120m (£65m).^[
 At the same time, his works often appear at auction. According to artnet, an online firm that tracks the art market, $76.9m worth of Richter’s work was sold at auction in 2010. Richter's high turnover volume reflects his prolificacy as well as his popularity. As of 2012, no fewer than 545 distinct Richter's works had sold at auctions for more than $100,000. 15 of them had sold for more than $10,000,000 between 2007 and 2012.
Richter’s paintings have been flowing steadily out of Germany since the mid-1990s even as certain important German collectors — Frieder Burda, Josef Fröhlich, Georg Böckmann, and Ulrich Ströher — have held on to theirs.
Richter's candle paintings were the first to command high auction prices. Three months after his MoMA exhibition opened in 2001, Sotheby's sold his Three Candles (1982) for $5.3 million. In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty sold her Kerze (1983) for £7,972,500 ($15 million), triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's in London.
 His 1982 Kerze (Candle) sold for £10.5 million ($16.5 million) at Christie's London in October 2011.
In February 2008, Christie's London set a first record for Richter's “capitalist realism” pictures from the 1960s by selling the painting Zwei Liebespaare (1966) for £7,300,500 ($14.3 million) to Stephan Schmidheiny.
In 2010, the Weserburg Modern Art Museum in Bremen, Germany, decided to sell Richter’s 1966 painting Matrosen (Sailors) in a November auction held by Sotheby’s, where John D. Arnol  bought it for $13 million.

Another coveted group of works is the “Abstrakte Bilder” series, particularly those made after 1988, which are finished with a large squeegee rather than a brush or roller. At Pierre Bergé & Associés in July 2009, Richter’s 1979 oil painting Abstraktes Bild exceeded its estimate, selling for €95,000 ($136,000).
Richter's Abstraktes Bild, of 1990 was made the top price of 7.2 million pounds, or about $11.6 million, at a Sotheby's sale in February 2011 to a bidder who was said by dealers to be an agent for the New York dealer Larry Gagosian.
 In November 2011, Sotheby’s was selling a group of colorful abstract canvases by Richter, including Abstraktes Bild 849-3 from the collection of Marc and Victoria Sursock, a dreamy 1997 canvas of pinks and blues that was estimated at $9 million to $12 million. It made a record price for the artist at auction when Lily Safra  paid $20.8 million^[only to donate it to the Israel Museum afterwards. Only months later, a record $21.8 million was paid at Christie's for the 1993 painting Abstraktes Bild 798-3.^[76] At Art Basel in 2012, Pace Gallery reportedly sold the red, blue and yellow abstract AB Courbet (1986), priced at about $25 million.When asked about amounts like that Richter said "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft!

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