Sotheby’s Adds Gerhard Richter Cloud Painting to London Sale

By Abby Schultz, July 8, 2020 8:01 am ET

Gerhard Richter's Wolken (fenster) (Clouds (Window)), 1970. Courtesy of Sotheby's

Sotheby’s is now calling its cross-category London sale on July 28 “From Rembrandt to Richter” with the addition of Gerhard Richter’s Wolken (fenster), (Clouds (Window))to the live evening auction. 

The monumental 1970 oil painting, which spreads across four panels at a width of more than 13 feet and is being sold from a private collection, is estimated to achieve between £9 million and £12 million (US$11.2 million to US$15 million). The painting, which gives a viewer the impression of being “on the top floor of a skyscraper, looking through the clouds,” according to Sotheby’s head of sale Emma Baker, was last sold at a 2014 Christie’s auction in London for £6.2 million. 

The other headline work in the sale, Rembrandt’sSelf-portrait, wearing a ruff and black hat, 1632, is expected to fetch between £12 million and £16 million. The auction—which will be streamed globally and may include visitors in the saleroom if U.K. regulations at the time allow—includes works from several categories, including Old Masters, impressionist and modern, contemporary, and modern British art.

The landscape nature of Richter’s Wolken fits well into an auction that spans art history, and includes Jan Van Goyen’s Coastal Scene with Small Vessels in a Choppy Sea, 1652, an oil-on-panel painting of a seascape with a large sky filled with billowing gray-white clouds that's expected to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000. From the 19th century, the sale also includes Gustav Bauernfeind’s Jerusalem, from the Mount of Olives at Sunrise, circa 1902, an oil-on-canvas landscape expected to achieve between £3 million and £4 million. 

Jan Van Goyen Coastal Scene with Small Vessels in a Choppy Sea, 1652. Courtesy of Sotheby's

The expansive blue-gray clouds, radiating pink from the sun, in Richter’s Wolken unites the more traditional aesthetics of these earlier time periods with the contemporary “in a powerful and beautiful way,” Baker says. 

“While you might think they are anachronistic, old-fashioned, they are not at all,” she adds. “They have this fantastic double-speak—they reference art history [such as the Romantic-period landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich] at the same time they make the case for painting validity in the 20th and 21st century.”

The 88-year-old German artist began to paint clouds and landscapes in the late 1960s and 1970s. “It’s just before he figures out what he’s doing with abstraction,” Baker says. “The landscapes do operate in this interstitial moment for Richter, that kind of facilitates him moving on to this play with pure abstraction.”

Richter’s Abstraktes Bilder series, which came later, and are painted with a squeegee, are perhaps his best known, fetching the most eye-popping prices, including Sotheby’s London sale of Abstraktes Bild (599), 1986,for £30.4 million in February 2015. 

Baker argues that the “market wants something different now” from Richter. “That’s where we are with the cloudscapes and landscapes—another facet of his career that again is coming to light with a renewed emphasis in the market.” Wolken, she says, “is an extraordinary example” of this period and series of the artist’s works.  

The July 28 evening sale will feature about 70 works in all, with about 15 to 20 lots in each category. 

The sale also features a European collection of early 20th century art that has largely been unseen since the mid-1980s. The entire sale, Baker says, includes “so many works that speak to each other across these diverse and massive gaps of art history.”

Article published on www.barrons.com