Marian Goodman’s Gerhard Richter ‘Candle’ Painting sells for $35.1 M

The work, Kerze (Candle),1982, had been estimated at $35 million to $50 million and was one of eight Richter works offered from Goodman’s estate in Christie’s Marian’s Richters & 21st Century Evening Sale.

The sale lasted less than two minutes. Christie’s auctioneer Yü-Ge Wang described the painting ahead of the bidding as part of Richter’s “greatest series” and called it a “quiet message of hope.” The lot carried a third-party guarantee.

This particular Kerze painting has been in the personal collection of Marian Goodman, the legendary dealer and longtime friend of the artist, for the past four decades. She acquired the painting following an exhibition at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Stuttgart the previous year in which four of Richter’s Kerzen paintings were shown for the first time, alongside a selection of his new large-scale abstract works from 1982. As with many of the 20^th Century’s greatest artistic statements, none sold initially. Goodman, however, spotted their potential almost immediately. At the time, the art world was dominated by a new generation of Neo-Expressionist painters including Jean-Michael Basquiat and Julian Schnabel in the U.S. and Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck in Germany. However, Goodman saw something different in Richter’s work, “[He] was a bit drowned out by all these loud, expressionist voices,” she remembered. “So I wrote him a letter just telling him how much I loved the work and maybe I could make a difference… everything started from there.”

The result fell short of Richter’s record of $46.3 million, set in 2015 when Abstraktes Bild (599) sold at Sotheby’s London.