Eric Clapton to auction off $20m Gerhard Richter painting while David Bowie collection grips collectors

Eric Clapton, the British guitarist and song-writer, is once again showing off his acumen as an art collector, turning to Christie’s to sell a Gerhard Richter abstract purchased fifteen years ago.

The auction house says the work, “Abstraktes Bild (809-2)”, will be featured in its Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in New York on 15 November.

With its bold strokes and vivid colouring, the oil-on-canvas work has been doing the exhibition rounds of Christie’s salesrooms, including in Paris and London, before arriving in New York in November to go under the gavel. It can be seen in London during the first week of October.

The painting, which is 7 feet in height, was one of a series of four painted by the German artist in 1994. One is in the joint collection of the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Mr Clapton, who has emerged as a canny mover of the world art market, purchased three of the works at auction in 2001. He paid only £2million ($3.2 million) for the three of them. One sold for $34.2 million in 2012 and a second for nearly $20.9 million in 2013.

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The art world is also agog at the coming sale by Sotheby’s of the collection of the late David Bowie, who, before his death this year, was another icon of the British music industry who also spent much of his energies surrounding himself with artworks.

‘Bowie Collector’, which includes pieces by Damien Hirst, Henry Moore, Harold Gilman and Graham Sutherland, was on display at Sotheby’s in New York this week and is now en route to Hong Kong before it goes up for sale at Sotheby’s London also in November.

That sale will include among its most anticipated lots Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, Air Power, 1984, with an estimate £2,500,000–3,500,000. Also in the sale will be Frank Auerbach's Head of Gerda Boehm, 1965, with an estimate of £300,000–500,000.

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If the third Richter brings in the estimated $20 million next month, Mr Clapton will have reaped about $70 million altogether from the trio he bought in 2001. That’s about 20 times what he paid then. “It’s an amazing return in 15 years,” Francis Outred, Christie’s chairman and head of postwar and contemporary art for Europe, Middle East, Russia and India told Bloomberg News.

When Mr Clapton sold the first of his Richter’s at Christie’s New York in 2012 for $34 million it went down in history as the highest price ever paid at auction for a living artist. It had only been expected to sell for between $14.5 million and $19.3 million.

Prices for works for Mr Richter, who is now 84 years old, have, however, suffered something of a slump in recent years. Two of his works at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s were withdrawn this year and, according to Artprice, his auction sales are down 92 per cent since their peak in 2012.

The Clapton sale in November will be a test of whether his appeal in the international market might once again pick up.