She had been sleeping for 30 years in her “art library”: the town of Saint-Priest, in the Lyon suburbs (Rhône), is going to put on sale a work by the German star of abstract painting, Gerhard Richter. Which could earn him millions of euros.
“Abstraktes Bild 630-2”, an oil on canvas (82×67 cm) produced in 1987, was acquired the following year for 100,000 francs by the municipality, which had an acquisition fund for works of contemporary art . “Every year, we went to Paris in galleries to buy it. We wanted a working-class town to have access to it,” explains the assistant for culture at the time, Robert Rivière, in Wednesday’s edition. from the regional daily Progress.
Gerhard Richter, 89, has become one of the most expensive painters in the world, although he remains little known to the general public. In 2015, another “Abstraktes Bild”, numbered 599, found a taker for 30.4 million pounds (44.5 million euros at the exchange rate at the time) at a sale at Sotheby’s in London. A record for a living painter, since broken by Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
Decision expected on November 18
This sale had not gone unnoticed in Saint-Priest, where an inventory of the municipal artothèque – a structure for lending works of art functioning as a library – had just been made, explains the mayor to AFP. of the city, Gilles Gascon (LR). “We presented Richter’s canvas to an expert, who told us not to leave it lying around,” said the elected official, specifying that in the past, the work had not been loaned to individuals but only exhibited by the municipality.
“It has since been kept in a safe by a specialized bank. But its real place is in a museum or with a collector who will know how to enhance it,” said the mayor. Hence the decision to sell it at auction, which the city council must validate on November 18.
Eight other paintings acquired in the 1980s, of lesser value, could also be sold.
For that of Richter, “we were given figures that make you dizzy”, adds Gilles Gascon, who expects to be solicited by major auction houses. And promises that the money obtained will be reinvested in culture.
The municipal art library has a total of a thousand works. These structures for the dissemination of contemporary art, initiated in the 1960s by André Malraux and developed in the 1980s by Jack Lang, number a few dozen in France.
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