The blockbuster sale Friday evening at Sotheby’s London of Gerhard Richter’s magisterial “Abstraktes Bild (809-4)” from the collection of rocker Eric Clapton set a record for a painting by a living artist, bringing in a staggering £21.3 million ($34.2 million). It smashed the previous Richter record set this past May at Christie’s New York when “Abstraktes Bild (798-3)” (1993) sold for $21,810,500.

Oddly, the 10-page catalogue entry of text and pictures about the star lot at Sotheby’s failed or neglected to mention that when the 1994 painting last sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2001 (just two months after 9/11) for $3,415,750, it was one of three identically scaled paintings in the lot, each measuring 88½-by-78¾ inches, sold by noted Berlin collectors Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch. The other two were similarly listed in the authoritative style of numbering used in the the Richter catalogue raisonne as “Abstraktes Bild 809-1” and “Abstraktes Bild 809-2.” (There is also a fourth painting in the “809” series, “809-3.”)

All of the four 809 pictures were previously exhibited in London at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in the 1995 exhibition, “Gerhard Richter: Paintings in the Nineties,” which is where the Pietzsch’s acquired the three works. It is understood that Eric Clapton retains “809-1”and “809-2” from the group. Basically, the situation sounds as if a Richter triptych was broken up to serve the market, erasing its triplet or quadruplet paternity along the way.

The explosive growth of the Richter market, especially for the large and variously colored abstracts, executed in his brushless, squeegee style, now rivals Warhol. Were the Pietzsch/Clapton paintings a pastiche put together without the permission of the artist by a savvy collector or dealer, as one might do with a silk screened group of Warhol “Jackies,” or was it actually conceived and meant to live as a stand-alone grouping (the way it was presented when it came to auction back in 2001)?

There have been other examples of Richter triptychs coming to market and subsequently being broken up, as evidenced by “Fisch (588 1-3)” and “Schiff (589 1-3)” (both 1986), comprised of six 63-by-59-inch paintings that sold as a single lot at Christie’s New York in May 2001 for the modest sum of $1,436,000 to San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier. The paintings were sold by the UK-based BOC Group PLC and had hung together in the company’s reception area in Surrey, according to Christie’s catalogue notes. The auction catalogue also noted the works were acquired directly from the artist. Meier subsequently sold one of the triptychs to a German museum and the second triptych to a private collector.

Referring to the Clapton paintings, Meier, a longtime Richter secondary market dealer, discounted their triptych heritage, noting, “Those were just three paintings from the Pietzch collection and arbitrarily put together as three and sold accordingly. Clapton happened to be the buyer. It’s not as if a triptych was broken up.” In Meier’s view, “There was no moral obligation or fiduciary duty o the part of the owner to keep the works together. 

Seasoned New York dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, who underbid the Pietzch pictures back at Sotheby’s in November 2001, recalled that notes she took at the time also indicated the paintings were simply presented as one lot comprising three works. Still, she was puzzled about the lack of clarity in the Sotheby’s catalogue for the Clapton work and the absence of any reference to its past association with two other abstracts. “Why didn’t Sotheby’s say anything about it?” asked Mitchell-Innes.

“Probably, what we should have said is that this was one of three [from that sale], but we didn’t,” remarked Tobias Meyer, the worldwide head of Sotheby’s contemporary art who also represented the underbidder over the phone during Friday's battle for the record-breaking Richter in London.

The auctioneer reiterated that the paintings were not conceived as a triptych but that the original owners who acquired the paintings at Anthony d’Offay in London put them together that way. “Although we sold them as paintings together in 2001, they are indeed three completely separate paintings.”

Meyer also observed that “it was a unique situation at the time,” considering the trio made a then-record price for a Richter lot at auction. “We’re happy to have this painting back,” he added, referring to Friday's record-busting lot, “because out of the three, this is the most vibrant and the one with the most amount of red in it. Red is a very successful color these days.”

Reached in Paris where her gallery is represented at FIAC, Marian Goodman, Richter’s longtime dealer, also had questions about the painting. “It never was a triptych,” she said. “There are four paintings [in the group] — if you look at the numbers in the catalogue raisonne you can see. I don’t know what happened to the fourth ('809-3').” Goodman said she had discussed the situation with the artist himself yesterday, “and that there are a lot of open questions.”

It turns out that “809-3” is in the Artist Rooms Collection, held jointly by the Tate, London and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. It was acquired jointly through the d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund in 2008. Efforts to reach Anthony d’Offay, the retired London dealer and art donor, were unsuccessful at press time.

Asked about the veracity of the triptych appellation or any other description of the Clapton lot, Robert Storr, the author and former Museum of Modern Art curator who organized the “Gerhard Richter-Forty Years of Painting” retrospective there in 2002, said the painting, “which is not complete in and of itself,” has long since been treated by the market “as a self-sufficient work.”

As Storr reminds us, “Naturally the artist has no responsibility for these transactions, could not have prevented them had he wanted to do so, and does not benefit from them. It all strikes me as pretty strange, but ‘money talks’ even when it has nothing to say.”