The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By KELLY CROW

After a summer marked by uneven sales, Sotheby's in New York plans to anchor its major November auctions with a pair of brand-name stalwarts: Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso.

In a season of art-market uncertainty, Sotheby's plans to anchor its big fall auction series in New York this November with a pair of brand-name stalwarts: Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso. Kelly Crow has details on Lunch Break.

John Marion, a former Sotheby's president, and his wife, Anne, a Texas oil heiress and major collector of modern art, have enlisted the auction house to help them sell Mark Rothko's "No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)," a 1954 abstract that depicts a trio of fuzzy-edged red, pink and blue rectangles stacked atop a rose background.

Sotheby's

Rothko's 'No. 1' will kick off Sotheby's November auctions in New York

Sotheby's didn't name the sellers but dealers say the work is widely known to belong to the Marions. The house expects to sell it Nov. 13 for $35 million to $50 million.

Rothko is a master of Abstract Expressionism, and his midcentury meditations on color and modernism have sold well in good times and bad: At the market's last peak in 2007, one of his 1950 abstracts sold at Sotheby's for $72.8 million. Four months ago, Christie's in New York topped that record-setting price by getting $86.8 million for a 1961 Rothko, "Orange, Red, Yellow." That work was only priced to sell for up to $45 million.

Rothko created more than 800 paintings before he died in 1970. Today, the size and color of these pieces play a big role in his asking prices—the bigger and more sunset-colored the painting, the better, dealers say. The example Sotheby's is offering stands 9½ feet tall, eclipsing the current record holder by nearly 2 feet. The jewel-toned hues in "No. 1" are also saturated rather than pale. From a distance, it evokes a distilled seascape.

Sotheby's

Picasso's 'Woman at the Window (Marie-Thérèse)'

In a realm where museum appearances can also alter a work's value, "No. 1" can claim to be one of eight pieces created for "Recent Paintings by Mark Rothko," a major solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Other examples from that same exhibit have since changed hands at auction for as much as $17.3 million apiece. Several more now belong to museums, such as the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Abstract Expressionists like Rothko and Clyfford Still are seeing higher prices now in part because of renewed bidding from U.S. collectors, said Sotheby's specialist Tobias Meyer. Before the recession, Mr. Meyer said, these collectors mostly sat on the sidelines, unable to compete with bidders from Russia and the Middle East. But in the past year, Americans have returned. "The sticker shock is gone," he said.

Sotheby's said a highlight of its Nov. 5 sale of Impressionist and modern art will be Picasso's rainbow-hued portrait of the artist's mistress, "Woman at the Window (Marie-Thérèse)." The 1936 work, which is priced to sell for $15 million to $20 million, remained with the artist until his death in 1973. Its current seller, who remains anonymous, has owned it for the past three decades, Sotheby's said.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 21, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looking Out for 'No. 1'.

By KELLY CROW

Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Gilbert & George's 'Dead' (2001) is at New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery.

The London-based art duo known as Gilbert & George first rose to fame in the late 1960s by donning dapper suits and treating themselves like living sculptures. It turns out that they're also petty thieves.

About seven years ago, the pair began stealing the sandwich-board-style posters that London's newspapers often use to hail their latest headlines, typically tabloid fare like "Man Dies in Human Fireball Horror." On Thursday, the artists opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from all 3,712 posters they amassed. Unlike the actual newspapers, these black-and-white posters aren't for sale, but "the images and stories they conjure are amazing," said one of the artists, Gilbert Proesch.

The pair said that they would usually wait until dinnertime before canvassing the newsstands in their East London neighborhood. Then one of the artists would try to distract the shopkeeper by buying a candy bar or chewing gum while the other slipped the poster out of its wire casing. A few times they would have to wait until the owner "went to the lavatory," said George Passmore. "Then we'd tuck the poster into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal."

To transform the posters into art, the artists grouped headlines by common terms—say, murder—and arranged them into grids that sit atop eerie photographs of brick walls, tilted windows and alleyways. The artist's faces also pop up throughout the images, Big Brother-style. The portrait of society that emerges from the posters is accordingly grim. "We found very few happy terms," Mr. Proesch said. "That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part."

"Gilbert & George: London Pictures" will be on view at the galleries through June 23.

An Extended Q&A with Gilbert & George

On Thursday, the London art duo Gilbert & George opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from 3,712 newspaper posters they collected in London over a six-year period.

Recently, the artists agreed to discuss the project that became "Gilbert & George: London Pictures," up at the galleries through June 23. Here's an edited excerpt.

George: Ten years ago we took our first images of some newspaper posters for a group of pictures called the Bomb pictures, which were based on bomb attacks in Mumbai and London and around the world. Those were shown at the Tate Modern. We didn't think of them as "poster" pictures, but after a while, we realized there were so many subjects we could address—hangings, hate—in a way that could feel very different from simply using a pencil or a brush. With the posters, we could also do that.

Gilbert: All these extraordinary modern subject matters, we don't have to make them up. They were all there, and they began to create in our minds an amazing, modern, Western townscape."

George: In some pockets of the world, there's no free press, and in those areas you won't see sex stories wind up as newspaper headlines. Maybe these posters are actually a celebration of the freedoms of the press in the West.

Gilbert: We worked on it for six years. Every day we had to steal roughly three posters, and finally we had 3,712.

George: We'd steal them on the way to dinner. We always walk through East and North London to go to dinner, and it's very difficult because we didn't want to get caught.

Gilbert: The shopkeepers will stop you if they can.

George: Gil can be pretty devious. He would usually go into the shop to buy some chewing gum or a Mars bar, and then I'd use that time to steal the poster. We became very professional. We were both very good. If it was a difficult shop, we'd wait and wait until the shopkeeper went to the lavatory. Then we'd tuck them into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal. When it was raining, we'd steal the posters wet.

Gilbert: Then after six years, we said, "That's it. We have enough." So we began to divide up the pile into categories based on the words in the headlines, like "murder," "sex" or "money."

George: Those were the three words that popped up most often, and you don't have to go to university to understand why. But we were still really fascinated by our collective fascination with dying and killing. It's extraordinary. We also saw very early on the two levels these posters work on: Obviously they're used to sell newspapers, but they also dwell so heavily on shame and human disaster.

Gilbert:The images and stories these words conjure are amazing: "Man Found Hanging in Graveyard," "Pal Dies in Copycat Hanging." What a story is caught up in that combination of words.

George: They're like haikus.

Gilbert:The relentless mantra of messiness. We wound up making 292 pictures using all the posters.

George: We like that we're celebrating something – the newspaper poster – that might not exist at the end of our lifetimes. People are finding different ways of selling papers now. Online. But when we first moved to London, we had trouble losing our country backgrounds. Reading the local papers was one of the first ways we became citified. The London Evening Standard for many years employed a man who drew the poster headlines on tin every day, and then a new owner came in and they started printing them with a standard typeface. But when we started stealing these posters, we could tell whenever he went on holiday, because those days were the only ones that used a standard typeface instead of his own hand-drawn versions. Just once a year he went away.

Gilbert:Besides the shopkeepers, we might have been the only people to notice that man's holiday. Most people don't notice much. In that way, life always seems invisible—unless you slap people and make them look. That's why art stops time. It makes them stop and look. That's why we want powerful imagery in our art—we want them to remember it.

George: It's a freezing moment.

Gilbert: That's what the posters want to do too, which is why arresting words like "sex" and "death" pop up so often. We found very few happy terms. That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part. Maybe that part can also feel fake, no?

George: Just look at the countries that only produce happy art—most of those places are totalitarian, like North Korea. The art there feels artificially happy.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Stealing Headlines for Art's Sake.

• By KELLY CROW

In the early 1980s, German artist Gerhard Richter painted 24 views of flickering white candles, and not a single one sold. When one of those "Candle" canvases came up at Christie's in London this past fall, it sold for $16.5 million.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A visitor at the blockbuster retrospective 'Gerhard Richter: Panorama' at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie; it will travel to Paris in June.

Few people can pinpoint the moment when an artist becomes iconic in the way of Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, but right now the art world is trying to anoint Mr. Richter. Last year, his works sold at auction for a total of $200 million, according to auction tracker Artnet—more than any other living artist and topping last year's auction totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko combined. At Mr. Richter's gallery in New York, the waiting list for one of his new works, which can sell for $3 million apiece, is several dozen names long.

In November at Sotheby's, London collector Lily Safra paid $20.8 million for Mr. Richter's 1997 eggplant-colored "Abstract Painting," an auction record for the artist. Other artists have sold individual works at higher prices—Jeff Koons, for example—but in terms of volume at auction, Mr. Richter currently tops the market.

The artist's ascent is being driven by market demands as much as curatorial merit: Auction houses and museums, eager for new masters to canonize, are showcasing Mr. Richter's works around the world at an ever-increasing clip. An influx of international collectors and dealers are also seizing the moment to buy or sell his pieces at a profit—including art-world tastemakers such as Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich, French luxury-goods executive Bernard Arnault, dealer Larry Gagosian, Taiwanese electronics mogul Pierre Chen and New York hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen.

   

 

Germany's Gerhard Richter's artworks sold at auction last year for a total of $176 million, more than any other living artist. Kelly Crow has a profile of Richter and his work on Lunch Break. Photo: Sotheby's

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German artist Gerhard Richter.

Mr. Richter's work is uniquely suited to the tastes of the current art market. Like Picasso, he paints in a number of different styles—from rainbow-hued abstracts to poignant family portraits—giving collectors plenty of choice. Like Warhol, he is prolific, which ensures a steady volume of his works in the marketplace—yet enough of his works are in museum collections that he has avoided a glut. And ever since the deaths last year of painters Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, collectors searching for another senior statesman have started giving his work a closer look.

Collectors are paying a particular premium for Mr. Richter's larger abstracts from the late 1980s, which have all the visual impact of a work by Francis Bacon or Mr. Rothko, artists whose prices spiked before the recession. These abstracts are also immediately identifiable as being Mr. Richter's creations, making them easy status symbols. San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier says, "Collectors want an iconic work in a format that everyone recognizes. Monkey see, monkey do."

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Mr. Richter, 80 years old, isn't a household name in the U.S. yet, but he's revered in Europe. Born in Dresden, he fled the former East Germany months before the Berlin Wall went up. He has spent the past six decades experimenting with ways to refresh traditional painting categories like the still life. He's best known for haunting family portraits that evoke smudged newspaper clippings—a wry response to Pop that won him a pre-eminent spot among Europe's postwar painters. He also uses an oversized squeegee the size of a car bumper to create layered abstracts. That he flits between several painting styles, rather than sticking to one signature look, has always confounded some audiences, yet the toggling is actually his calling card, the painter as polymath.

A blockbuster retrospective, "Gerhard Richter: Panorama," has been crisscrossing the art capitals of Europe, having just traveled from London's Tate Modern to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, where it will show through May 13. So far, the show has drawn large crowds; it heads to Paris's Centre Pompidou in June.

For his part, Mr. Richter seems a reluctant commodity. At a time when superstar artists typically have a different dealer for every continent, he funnels nearly all his new works through New York dealer Marian Goodman. Both are soft-spoken and rarely attend high-profile auctions. The pair has declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. For years, their combined efforts have helped his price levels retain an air of integrity. Ms. Goodman, speaking on behalf of the artist, who declined to be interviewed himself, said, "He has an honest market."

Ol auf Holz Museum Ludwig, Koln;ln/Privatsammlung © Gerhard Richter 2012

Mr. Richter has created more than 3,000 paintings, but nearly 40% of them (including 'Betty,' pictured here) are in museum collections, which has prevented a market glut.

Not everyone is ready to bet on Mr. Richter. Jose Mugrabi and David Nahmad, major dealers in Warhol and Picasso, respectively, said they don't think Mr. Richter has enough heft to compete with the market presence of those modern masters. Mr. Mugrabi said Mr. Richter's art is more fashionable now than it used to be, but not more important.

Trends in contemporary art, as in fashion, can also change quickly, so it's unclear whether Mr. Richter's prices will keep climbing or drop again over the long run. In the late 1980s, prices for Frank Stella's geometric paintings rose quickly to nearly $4 million before reaching a plateau in 1989 that he hasn't matched at auction since. Mr. Rothko's abstract paintings also soared to $72.8 million during the market's last peak in 2007, but nothing by him has sold for half as much in the past couple of years. Art adviser Nicolai Frahm says he's counseling his collector clients to hold off seeking Mr. Richter's works "until his prices equalize."

Sotheby's

Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich is among the influential collectors who have helped to make Mr. Richter's market. Mr. Abramovich paid $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's 1990 'Abstract Painting' at Sotheby's.

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, said he thinks such lofty comparisons to Picasso and Warhol will hold up, though. "Richter doesn't want to be the next king, but he has taken painting farther than just about anyone else," he said.

Richter's Rise

Mr. Richter works out of a pair of pristine studios in Cologne, including one attached by a garden path to the home he shares with his third wife, Sabine, and their young son, Moritz. Mr. Richter suffered a stroke a few years ago, but he remains fit and moves easily, his face framed by a jaunty pair of translucent eyeglasses.

The son of a Dresden schoolteacher, Mr. Richter grew up in communist East Germany, steeped in the academic rigors of Soviet Realism. Some of his first jobs included painting murals of cheery workers for the state. In 1959, he saw Western contemporary art for the first time at an exhibition called Documenta in the German town of Kassel; afterward, he told friends he would have to rethink what he knew about art after seeing Jackson Pollock's drippy splatters and Lucio Fontana's punctured canvases.

Sotheby's

Part of Mr. Richter's appeal to collectors: He paints in a wide range of styles, from colorful abstracts to hazy portraits. His 'Sailors' sold for $13.2 million at Sotheby's.

Two years later, he and his wife, Ema, enlisted a friend to sneak them by car into West Berlin so he could study art without political constraint. The couple moved to Düsseldorf, and by the end of the summer the Berlin Wall had gone up. He never saw his parents again.

Over the next decade, the artist grappled with occasional homesickness—and the legacy of his country's role in the war—by painting portraits of his relatives that looked like black-and-white photographs, only hazy. The subjects included his "Aunt Marianne," who was exterminated by the Nazis because she was mentally ill, and his "Uncle Rudi," a Nazi soldier who died fighting in the war.

Rudolf Zwirner, one of the artist's earliest dealers, was impressed when he saw the work in 1962; few German artists were addressing such disquieting topics. For years after the war, wealthy American collectors who were championing Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol considered German art "taboo," Mr. Zwirner said, so he and other dealers cultivated collectors for Mr. Richter nearby. Their prices rarely topped $1,000. "I sold Richters to my physician, my neighbors, my brother—anybody I could convince," he said. To this day, it's not unusual for bourgeois families in the region to own dozens of works by the artist; one collector in Munich owns 70 works. By the time Mr. Richter was invited to represent Germany in the 1972 Venice Biennale, his pool of countrymen collectors was deep.

Christie's

Mr. Richter's 1982 'Candle' painting sold in October at Christie's for $16.5 million.

In the years that followed, Mr. Richter churned through several different series—like those candles—which didn't sell as well as the angst-ridden paintings of his German contemporaries like Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. But in the mid-1980s, he began making brightly colored abstracts, and collectors pounced. San Francisco collectors Donald and Doris Fisher, who founded the Gap retail chain, bought several of these works.

The real turning point for Mr. Richter came in 1995 when New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $3 million for a suite of 15 grisaille paintings called "Oct. 18, 1977." The artist painted this cycle in 1988 as a response to the arrest, trial and grisly death in 1977 of a group of young German anarchists-turned-terrorists. Mr. Storr, the Yale dean who then served as the museum's senior curator of painting and sculpture, began planning a major survey of Mr. Richter's work for the museum.

As soon as word leaked about the museum show, Mr. Zwirner said his phone started ringing with American collectors seeking Richters. A year later, in 1996, Sotheby's in London put a Richter on the cover of one of its sale catalogs. Back in Germany, longtime collectors started getting letters from auction houses: Did they care to sell a Richter?

MoMA's long-awaited survey opened six years later, in 2001, and suddenly series that had seemed random when they debuted, like his "Candle" works, seemed relevant, said Sotheby's specialist Cheyenne Westphal. Three months after the exhibit opened, the auction house sold his "Three Candles" for $5.3 million.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Mr. Richter with his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman

Two years after that, a lawyer and collector based in Zurich named Joe Hage began gathering auction prices and exhibit details about the works in Mr. Richter's oeuvre. He started a website, gerhard-richter.com, and began posting the results online.

For newer, Internet-savvy collectors, Mr. Hage's site has proved popular because of all that its tallying has revealed. Mr. Richter has created 3,000 paintings—fewer than Warhol's 8,000 silk-screens but considerably more than Salvador Dalí's 1,200 works. He's also heavily traded, with more than 200 of his works turning up at auction every year, which provides buyers with a regular stream of price points to analyze. Museums own roughly 38% of his works, though, including half of his most coveted works, those large squeegee abstracts.

By 2006, an influx of newly wealthy collectors began competing hard for contemporary art, spiking values for dozens of artists including Mr. Richter. Sotheby's began shipping its top Richters to Hong Kong so potential bidders there could see his works. In May 2006, a bidder at Berlin's Villa Griesbach auction house paid $1 million for Mr. Richter's 1971 portrait of "Mao." The following summer, the same painting came up for bid at Christie's in London and sold for $2.5 million.

Then came the snowball: In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty, sold her 1983 "Candle" for $15.8 million, triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's. Three months later, Mr. Abramovich dropped $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's green-gray "Abstract Painting" from 1990. It was only priced to sell for up to $7 million. With that, collectors recalibrated Mr. Richter's high bar to $15 million or more.

© Gerhard Richter, Courtesy The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Mr. Richter's 1997 'Abstract Painting,' which Lily Safra bought for $20.8 million at Sotheby's.

During the recession that followed, potential sellers of Mr. Richter's masterworks largely sat on the sidelines, but by late 2010, as the market perked up again, a fresh set of collectors began embellishing their collections with Richters. That November, Sotheby's got $13.2 million for his 1966 "Sailors," a work that spent years in the New Museum Weserburg in Bremen. The buyers were Houston hedge-fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura.

A pivotal sale four months ago sealed the deal. At Sotheby's in New York, London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock offered up eight Richter abstracts; all sold for well over their asking prices, including the abstract that went to Ms. Safra for $20.8 million. Last month in London, collectors came back for more: Christie's got $15.5 million for a green Richter abstract, while Sotheby's sold a creamy abstract to a former Zurich nightclub owner, Carl Hirschmann, for $4.8 million.

Mr. Richter has told friends he thinks his recent auction records are "absurd." But for his longtime collectors, they're paying dividends.

A few years ago, as Berlin endocrinologist Thomas Olbricht was constructing a five-story museum to showcase his art collection, he realized he was running low on cash. So he sold a blue-orange Richter abstract. Mr. Olbricht had paid about $287,000 for it in 1996; Christie's sold it for him in 2008 for $14.8 million.

Today, the museum, called the Me Collectors Room, rises from a narrow street in Berlin's bustling Mitte neighborhood. "I still wish I'd been able to keep that painting," Mr. Olbricht said. "Today, it would be worth $20 million."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Mar. 9, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Top-Selling Living Artist.

The current art market can be summed up in a single word: volatile.

"The upshot: Dealers say that while the art market has bounced back from the days of recession, collectors are still unpredictable and can be easily spooked, particularly if they think a top-billed work doesn't merit its blockbuster asking price."