A Gerhard Richter painting from the estate of the late dealer Marian Goodman sold at Christie’s Wednesday evening for $35.1 million (with fees). The sale fell well below Richter’s record of $46.3 million, which was set over a decade ago.
The lot, Kerze (Candle), from 1982, came to auction with an estimate of $35 million to $50 million, with the high being around $3.7 million higher than his current record. Ahead of the bidding, auctioneer Yü-Ge Wang described the work as being from his “greatest series” and as a “quiet message of hope.” Bidding started at $22 million and seemed to rise quickly in $2 million increments, but then almost just as quickly plateaued. After less than two minutes of anticlimactic bidding, the painting, which had a third-party guarantee, sold for a hammer price of $30 million to a hushed salesroom.
The Christie’s lot essay describes Richter’s “Kerze” series, begun after he showed the first of “Abstraktes Bild” paintings at Documenta 7 that year, as “a discreet series that combines the past and the present, memory and reality” that also reflects “the artist’s very personal experiences of living through the destruction of World War II and its aftermath.” The painting also engages in the art historical tradition of the still life, in which candles were often shown freshly snuffed out, suggesting the passing of time and the brevity of life. The imagery has also been used to symbolize faith, hope, enlightenment, divine presence, and knowledge.
“At first it was only intended to look pretty,” Richter would say of the series decades later, “but later a politically useful statement was also found in the picture… [as] candles had always been an important symbol for the GDR, as a silent protest against the regime… it was a strange feeling to see that a small picture of candles was turning into something completely different, something that I had never intended.”
Goodman, who represented Richter for decades until he departed her gallery for David Zwirner in 2022, purchased the work directly from the artist in 1989, and she held onto it for nearly 40 years. Goodman died in January, at 97 years old. It shows a simple white candle, set in a white holder, resting on a sill in the artist’s studio; its flame seemingly caught by a breeze as it sways to the left. The painting had first shown in a 1982 exhibition at Galerie Max-Ulrich Hetzler in Stuttgart, Germany.
“Nobody bought any of them,” Richter told the New York Times in 2002 about that early show of the “Kerze” paintings. “And they were very cheap. Now they sell for a fortune. But they were out of time and unexpected. People knew my abstracts and my landscapes. Then came the candles. So maybe they were therefore necessary. But it was also polemics on my part. You are not supposed to do religious symbols. And when people attack religious symbols too much, this motivates me to react.”
Though buyers may not have seen the appeal of Richter’s candle paintings early on, Goodman did. Richter “was a bit drowned out by all these loud, expressionist voices,” Goodman once told the Guardian of the Neo-Expressionist milieu in which the series emerged. “So I wrote him a letter just telling him how much I loved the work and maybe I could make a difference. Then I went to meet him in Dϋsseldorf in 1984 and everything started from there.” (Funny enough, while they eventually warmed to one another, Richter told the New Yorker in 2004 that the initial meeting was so awkward, “At last I said I was sorry, I had to work.”)
Gerhard Richter’s 18. Juni 2009 (2009) shows the artist and his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman.
Christie's
The just-sold painting was one of eight Richter works being offered from Goodman’s estate as part of the combined “Marian’s Richters & 21st Century Evening Sale” at Christie’s. (The auction house started the evening with a 12-lot auction of Minimalist works from the estate of ARTnews Top 200 collector Henry S. McNeil, Jr.)
Richter’s auction record was set in 2015 at a Sotheby’s London sale when his 1986 painting Abstraktes Bild (599) sold for $46.3 million. In terms of his market, the “Abstraktes Bild” series accounts for the majority of top sales, with nine of them filling the top 10 spots. Some 37 Richter works have exceeded $20 million at auction.
His second-priciest work, 1968’s Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan), is part of his earliest mature works, when he created photorealistic reproductions of various found images in black and white with a slight blur that unsettles the canvas. When it sold for $37.1 million in May 2013 at Sotheby’s New York, it reset the artist’s record and briefly held the distinction of being the most expensive work by a living artist to ever sell at auction. (Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) would handily best that record in November 2013 when it sold for $58.4 million.)
On the other hand, his “Kerze” works have reached far lower prices at auction. The two highest valued of these works barely crack his top 50 auction results. A 1982 version sold for $16.5 million in 2011, while a 1983 one sold for $15.8 million in 2008; both came to auction in London at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, respectively.
