Looking Away: Henry Taylor’s Riff on Gerhard Richter Portrait Tops $2 Million at Sotheby’s, ‘He Makes It So Entirely His Own’

Lot 102: HENRY TAYLOR, “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi,” 2017 (acrylic on canvas, 84 x 66 inches / 213.4 x 167.6 cm). | Estimate $800,000-$1.2 million. SOLD for $2,063,000 fees included

LOS ANGELES ARTIST Henry Taylor (b.1958) produces captivating narrative portraits—richly colored, loosely rendered, insightful images. Capturing his friends, family, Black history heroes, fellow artists, and contemporary cultural figures, the works may be humorous, heartfelt, or tend toward the political.

On Nov. 18, The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction at Sotheby’s New York featured a celebrated portrait by Taylor. “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” (2017) sold for more than $2 million, a near record for the artist.

Taylor has made portraits of many artist/friends, including Noah Davis (1983-2015), Khalil Joseph, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Rob Pruitt, and Andy Robert. “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” portrays Cassi Namoda, a Mozambique-born artist who was Taylor’s girlfriend when he created the painting. Today, Namoda lives and works in Italy.

The painting is a unique interpretation of portraiture. Taylor zeroes in on his subject as she turns away from the viewer. “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” is a reinterpretation of “Betty” (1988) by Gerhard Richter. The painting by the renowned German artist portrays his daughter. “Betty” is in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum. According to the museum, the potrait is based on a 1978 photograph of Richter’s 11-year-old daughter.

The defining elements of the portraits are the same—female subject, positioned with her head turning away from the viewer, wearing a white hoodie emblazoned with an all-over, red floral pattern. However, key characteristics differ. Richter’s work is photorealistic. Taylor’s version is rendered in a painterly, expressive style and depicts Namoda with a perfectly round, auburn-toned afro with copper highlights. Captured from behind, the hairstyle reads as a halo or radiant circle of light, that might symbolize spiritual glory, divinity, and majesty in his subject.

“Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” was featured in “Henry Taylor: B Side” (2022-24), the artist’s mid-career retrospective, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles (2022-23) and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2023-24).

Installation view of “Henry Taylor: B Side” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, December 2023. Shown, from left, “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” (2017) with portraits of Andrea Bowers, Steve Cannon, and Noah Davis. | Photo by Victoria L. Valentine

The B Side catalog includes full-page illustrations of “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” and “Nude Descending Down the Staircase” (2017), which was inspired by another Richter painting. A conversation between Taylor and Hamza Walker, a curator and director of The Brick in Los Angeles, a nonprofit visual art space known as LAXART at the time, is published the catalog. (Walker has also received the portrait treatment. Taylor titled the 2016 painting “Hamza (‘smart’) Walker.”)

The exchange between the artist and curator was excerpted from an interview published in Cultured Magazine in June 2017. The two discuss the sources for some of Taylor’s paintings:

HAMZA WALKER (HW): The word that I used when I first came into the studio was promiscuity, and here we are looking at a painting that is quite direct in referencing Gerhardt Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase). And you mentioned how you might take things from newspaper sources and alter them. But could you talk a little about your relationship to your source material? It seems it’s the means to an end, but not an end in itself. It seems like you don’t really give a shit about whether or not people know how direct you’re being about referencing something. It doesn’t seem that you have to hide that, or cover it up.

HENRY TAYLOR (HT): You know, it’s funny. I don’t know if it’s as relevant, but when I think about the past, when someone would write about me as an “outsider artist,” which means—we all know what that means—and so I think about that and I think about Gerhardt Richter. I mean I’ve been exposed to the history of art from an early age; my seventh-grade teacher went to Berkeley and studied art and English. So, although she might not have been into contemporary artists, I was exposed. So that eliminates the whole “outsider” thing. But the reference to Richter is just like, “Hey I’m familiar.”

HW: Was that painting made with the understanding of exhibiting it in another context?

HT: It’s like Kehinde [Wiley] doing thess historical figures—it’s like blackface, but it’s not really blackface. It’s a way of letting people know, in case they’re wondering, I do open up books. You know what I’m saying? Maybe you can relate on this level. But really, it’s spontaneous. And it might even be a homage. Like this here. I didn’t know what I was going to do [points to an assemblage sculpture] with toilet paper rolls but I put them in a circular fashion. It’s a homage to David Hammons and me just having camaraderie with other artists. It’s like I’m doing a cover. It’s Jimi Hendrix doing “All Along the Watchtower.”

HW: Oh yeah, right.

HT: I’m doing a motherfucking cover, and I hope my version is pleasing. You know, I don’t know if that’s an academic answer, but it’s an honest answer.

“¬[I]t’s spontaneous. And it might even be a homage. …me just having camaraderie with other artists. … I’m doing a motherfucking cover, and I hope my version is pleasing. You know, I don’t know if that’s an academic answer, but it’s an honest answer.” — Henry Taylor

David Galperin, vice chairman, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s discusses “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” (2017) by Henry Taylor and its connection to Gehardt Richter’s “Betty” (1988). | Video by Sotheby’s

According to Sotheby’s “Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” was acquired directly from Taylor in 2019 and remained in the same collection before coming to auction. The checklist for “B Side” lists the painting as belonging to the collection of Jeff Poe and Rosalie Benitez of Los Angeles.

(In 1994, Poe co-founded Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles with Tim Blum. Taylor was one of the gallery’s anchor artists before he joined Hauser & Wirth in 2020. Poe departed in 2023. Blum, continued the gallery, renaming it BLUM, before announcing he was shutting down the business for good in July 2025.)

Sotheby’s promoted Taylor’s painting with a lot essay and a video explaining the connection with Richter. The video features David Galperin, the auction house’s vice chairman, head of contemporary art.

“Here are two artists who make radically different work. however, both steeped in this idea of sourcing images, rewriting them, and challenging the truth that the photographic image holds. I think there’s also something so powerful to Henry Taylor reclaiming this image as RTOR’s career and his own stature as an artist has skyrocketed,” Galperin said.

“The portrait of Betty has become art history and an ideal of a sort of Western style portraiture. And Taylor in inserting the figure of Cassie Namoda in place of Betty, here he’s taking this ideal of Western portraiture, which is predominantly white, and reinterpreting it through a distinctly African American perspective. This is an image that revels in the power of painting and painting as a medium. It is an image that is appropriated and yet Taylor makes it so entirely his own.”

“Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi” sold for $2,063,000. The price achieved nearly twice estimate ($800,000-$1.2 million) and Taylor’s second-highest result at auction (His record was established by “From Congo to the Capital, and black again” (2007), which sold for $2,480,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2023. The record setter marked the first time Taylor’s work surpassed $1 million at auction and is another riff, all is his own, on the work of a white European artist. In this case, Pablo Picasso’s celebrated “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Taylor’s playful title highlights important art history lineage, connecting Paris-based Picasso’s African influences to his contemporary interpretation. CT

FIND MORE Jim Lewis wrote about Gerhardt Richter’s “Betty” painting for Artforum in 1993. Among his observations, the artist’s daughter posed, “like Ingres’ The Bather at Valpinçon, 1808, so that she is looking away from the viewer”

FIND MORE about artist Cassi Namoda on Art Basel’s website. Earlier this year, Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK, commissioned a window installation by Namoda. A solo exhibition of the artist “Cassi Namoda: Night Always Returns” (Sept. 5– Oct. 25, 2025) was recently on view at 303 Gallery in New York City. Next year, a monographic exhibition of Namoda opens at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.

BOOKSHELF
“Henry Taylor: B Side” documented the artist’s recent traveling retrospective and “Henry Taylor” is the artist’s first major monograph. Henry Taylor’s is also among the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition catalog “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe Black Figure.”