Eleven years after he bought it, Eric Clapton has made $30 million off of a Gerhard Richter painting titled Abstraktes Bild (809-4), that he sold on Friday at Sotheby's in London. The final price was 21.3 million pounds ($34.2 million), which is 30 times more than what he paid for it in 2001.
New York art dealer Christophe Van de Weghe told Business Week that, “While the market is selective, the Clapton provenance made a difference. It could have added as much as 20 percent to the price.” We imagine that Clapton's ownership of the work was a massive contributing factor; however, this is a beautiful, valuable work that certainly merits inflation on its own.
[via BusinessWeek]
