Art lovers drove the price of a painting by
the famous German artist Gerhard Richter to 2.1 million pounds (3 million
dollars) Thursday night despite the world financial crisis, dpa reported.
Sotheby's auction house said the price was at the maximum of what it had
estimated. It did not identify the buyer.
The 85-by-120-centimetre artwork, a misty landscape called Troisdorf,
originated in 1985 and is considered one of the 76-year- old German artist's
most impressive landscapes for his use of light.
Sotheby's highest price of the evening - 4.4 million pounds - was bid for the
Italian painter Lucio Fontana's Concetto Spaziale. But that was far under the 7
million pounds Sotheby's had projected.