Clapton to Sell Richter

Rock legend Eric Clapton will be offering his Gerhard Richter painting Abstraktes Bild (809-4) at Sotheby's in London.  It will be in the October, Frieze week sale and is expected to fetch $20 million, nearly 20 times the purchase price from Sotheby's in 2001.

Bloomberg states that Richter, now 80 years old has become one of the most bankable contemporary painters in the art market today.  Art as an asset class, and art as an investment looks very good when the returns are as strong as Richter's.  Of course, just like the stock market, you have to select correctly.

Bloomberg reports on the sale

When Clapton bought his painting, the average auction sale price of Richter’s work was $461,910, according to the database Artnet. This year, his successful lots average $2.6 million, an increase of 44 percent on 2011, said an Artnet Artist Index Report.

The artist’s highly decorative abstractions, often painted with a squeegee, have become particularly sought-after by wealthy international collectors. They have set seven of the 10 highest prices paid for the artist at auction.

Values have been boosted by the critical and popular success of recent retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, and the Pompidou Center, Paris, dealers said.

The auction record for the artist is the $21.8 million paid for the 1993 “Abstraktes Bild (798-3)” at Christie’s International in New York in May.

Together with the other two that Clapton bought, the painting being sold was worth about a third of the $3.4 million price which included fees.

Source: Bloomberg