Three artists—Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch—are among a newly published list of the richest 1,001 individuals and families in Germany. With an estimated fortune of €700m, Richter is ranked number 220 by the monthly business publication Manager Magazin. Kiefer and Rauch are both thought to be worth around €100m, which puts them at joint 935 in the rankings, which is made up principally of people from the business world.
When Richter’s painting Abstraktes Bild (1986) sold for more than £30m at Sotheby’s in 2015 he became the world’s most valuable living artist. Shortly afterwards, in an interview with the Die Zeit newspaper, he said that such sums shocked him, and dismissed an estimate of his personal worth as being €450m as a completely made-up figure.
Also on the list is Frieder Burda, one of the private collectors and admirers of Richter works. He belongs to the eponymous publishing house dynasty, which is also active in the UK, and runs a museum in Baden-Baden and a showroom in Berlin. His Richter show in 2014 was heavily criticised as overly commercial, with Julia Voss, the art historian, describing it as “industrial production”.
Also in the rankings, at number 67, is the family of Julia Stoschek, the art collector, said to have a fortune of €2.3bn.