One of the most expensive paintings sold by a living artist hung unnoticed in a Chicago hotel lobby

 

"Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter

   Hotels are not famous for fine art. Just the opposite. Once showcases for generic mass-produced canvases ranging from kitsch to trash, lately they lean toward cutesy black-and-white photos echoing the visual cliche of the moment. Vintage cars. Soda signs. Cowboys.
     So you are forgiven for missing the fact that, for years, what would become the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist hung largely unnoticed in a Downtown Chicago hotel lobby.
     It was "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" by Gerhard Richter, who is still alive. In fact, Monday, Feb. 9 is his 94th birthday. Richter is having a banner year, with a big show in Paris, and since my going is out of the question, the second best thing is to tell how one of his major works ended up next to the front desk at the Park Hyatt Chicago on Michigan Avenue, and why it is now gone.
     The Pritzker family — the clan of Illinois' courageous governor — runs the Hyatt chain of over 1,000 hotels. In 2000, wanting something to jazz up its new crown jewel, the Park Hyatt Chicago, a 70-story edifice at the corner of Michigan and Chicago, the Pritzkers decided to dig deep.
     “When we were building the hotel, my cousin, Nick, said, ‘Let’s go all in and get a great piece of art,'" Thomas Pritzker, then CEO and now executive chairman, of the Pritzker organization, told Sotheby's in 2014. “So he chose the Richter."
     Richter is an abstract German artist whose work is something of the love child of impressionism and photo realism. "Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan)" was commissioned in 1968 by the Siemens Corp., the German technology conglomerate, for its Milan headquarters and shows a blurry black-and-white image of the Cathedral Square there.
     Hyatt bought the painting in London for $3.6 million — not exactly cheap to begin with — and hung it in the Park Hyatt.
     I could pretend I know about the painting because my thumb is pressed on the pulse of all things cultural. Though the truth may be actually even cooler, in a lunch bucket vibe way. I've never stayed at the Park Hyatt. The only reason the hotel is on my radar is because it was erected during the late-1990s building boom. Tower cranes were everywhere and, curious guy that I am, I started wondering about the cranes — how do they get up there? — so I took a closer look.
     In 1999, crackerjack photographer Robert A. Davis and I visited the crane atop the nearly-completed Park Hyatt. That adventure bonded me to the place — being at the tip of the crane boom as it swung out 600 feet over Michigan Avenue will do that — and I made a point of circling back to see what it looked like when finished.
     The Richter caught my eye; it's hard to miss being 9 feet square. Guiding out-of-town guests through their Magnificent Mile window shopping, I'd detour into the hotel to check it out.
     The painting hung in the lobby for 15 years, except during 2002, when the hotel lent it to the Museum of Modern Art for a traveling retrospective of 40 years of Richter's work that included the Art Institute of Chicago.

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