Gerhard Richter Painting Sets Record Auction Price for a Living Artist After the critical success of a recent retrospective at the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris this year, the prices of paintings by Gerhard Richter have been soaring. They climbed higher still at Sotheby's in London on Friday, when "Abstraktes Bild (809-4)," one of the German artist's abstract canvases from 1994, sold to a mystery telephone bidder for $34.2 million. It had been estimated to bring $14.1 million to $18.8 million. The price was a record not only for Mr. Richter, but also for any living artist at auction - a distinction previously held by a Jasper Johns "Flag" painting from the 1960s, which brought $28.6 million when it sold at Christie's in New York in May 2010. Whoever bought "Abstraktes Bild (809-4) " paid more than 30 times what Eric Clapton did when he bought it at Sotheby's in New York in 2001.