Gerhard Richter painting sells for $37 million, record for living artist

Based on the prices that works of art have been going for at auctions lately, you might think that the world economy is not in trouble. At a Sotheby’s New York sale of contemporary works, a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter set the record for a work by a living artist, going for $37 million.

Richter’s Domplatz, Mailand is a 9-foot-by-9-foot canvas that Siemens Elettra had originally commissioned, notes The Associated Press. It looks as if it was a photograph taken on a rainy day and shows a shopping center in Milan.

According to The New York Times, when it first went up for auction in 1998 in London, it went for £2.2 million, which was around $3.65 million at the time. It wound up going for $37.1 million last night to a private New York collector.

A total of 53 pieces of art were sold for a total of $293 million during the sale. Barnett Newman’s 1953 work Onement VI went for $43.84 million, the highest price ever for a work by the color field artist. There were some disappointments for Sotheby’s though, including a Yves Klein sculpture titled Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre, SE 168, which went for $22 million.

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