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With a major Gerhard Richter retrospective having opened at the Tate Modern in London last month, the appetite for that German artist’s work seemed bottomless. Sotheby’s was selling a group of colorful abstract canvases by Mr. Richter, including “Abstraktes Bild,” 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 a telephone bidder paid $20.8 million.
Another top seller by Mr. Richter was “Gudrun,” a brightly colored painting from 1987 dominated by red and yellow diagonals, which brought $18 million, more than twice its $7.5 million high estimate. In 2001 it sold for $783,106 at Sotheby’s in London.
“Painterly paintings” was how John Elderfield, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, explained the appeal of the Richters and Stills. (He organized the blockbuster de Kooning retrospective now at MoMA.) “Maybe it is a de Kooning effect, with Richters and Stills flying off the walls.”
Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait,” a 1967 triptych of the artist depicted against a green background, also made a strong price, selling to a telephone bidder for $19.6 million. It had been expected to sell for $15 million to $20 million.
Sotheby’s did not have the quality of paintings by Warhol that Christie’s did on Tuesday night, and the results were mixed. One of the artist’s “Last Supper” paintings, this one from 1986, which had been estimated at $5.5 million to $7.5 million, brought $6.5 million to a telephone bidder.
As the audience was spilling out of the salesroom, reeling from the strong results, Lucy Mitchell-Innes, a former Sotheby’s expert who is now a Manhattan dealer, noted that on the electronic currency board there, rubles were missing, perhaps a sign that Russian buyers were going to be less in evidence this season.
“People still really enjoy the auction process,” she said. “It’s enthralling, they get a thrill and they get to take something home besides.”
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