Gerhard Richter and Two Other Lucky Artists Make the List of Germany’s Richest People

Find out which other German art giants are in the one percent.

Gerhard Richter attends the inauguration of his series of four paintings called "Birkenau" at the Reichstag on September 4, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

The annual ranking of the wealthiest people in Germany, conducted by the monthly Manager Magazin, is out and, unsurprisingly, the list includes some of the country’s most prominent collectors. However, for the first time since publishing the list which initially ranked the 300 wealthiest in 2001, then the top 500, the magazine has extended their analysis to name the 1001 richest Germans this year, making for the appearance of more artists among the one percent.

No stranger to the magazine’s rich list, Gerhard Richter has been steadily moving up in the ranking since 2011. This year, Richter occupies the spot of the 220th wealthiest German with an estimate net worth of €700 million ($830 million).

However, making a first appearance some 700 spots down the rungs, artists Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch share the 935th place, each with an estimated €100 million ($119 million), just enough to make the list which starts at €90 million.

This year, Germany’s richest woman, Susanne Klatten, who topped last year’s list and recently opened a private museum for her collection in Bavaria, is down to second place. (The Riemann family of entrepreneurs, whose net worth is estimated at €33 billion, are the richest Germans of 2017, but they are not known as art patrons.)

Collector Reinhold Würth is the 10th richest man in Germany, followed by Hasso Plattner, who inaugurated his private museum in Potsdam at the beginning of the year, as well as the Wildenstein Plattner Institute for art scholarship in late 2016.

German-born, American real estate tycoon Aby Rosen is also on the list, ranked 106.

Of the collectors named, many in fact have private museums or accessible collections that are open to the public, like Frieder Burda (ranked 146), who owns the Burda Museum in Baden-Baden and a showroom in Berlin; Thomas Olbricht (171), the collector behind the ME Collectors Room, in Berlin; Friedrich Christian Flick (295), whose collection is on permanent loan to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum; Ingvild Goetz (295), who opened a private museum in Munich in 1992; and Jochen Zeitz (809), who just recently launched the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town.


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