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

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" 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' 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" was commissioned in 1968 by the Siemens Corporation, 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 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 nine 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.

Given the schlock that hangs on most hotel walls, we ought to bow our heads for a moment in honor of that. Chicago hotels were once so well decorated that they'd loan their artwork to major museums. And LaSalle Bank used to have a full-time photo curator to manage its first-rate photography collection, before Bank of America bought it and stripped its soul like the spine being lifted out of a whitefish.

Fine art costs money — even insuring it costs a lot — and the airy aspirations of the chain owners ran into the practical considerations of the bean counters.

“When we were updating our insurance policies, we figured out the value,” Pritzker said. “I was astounded. Hyatt is a public company, and our job is to create shareholder value, so we decided it was in the best interest to sell it. But we would redeploy that capital in an art program.”

Create value they did, selling the painting in May 2013 for $37.1 million, a hefty profit and a record for a living artist at the time. (Surpassed that November, by a Jeff Koons balloon dog fetching $58 million.)

"It worked out really well.” Pritzker said.

The only question left: What is hanging in the Richter's place? I headed over, hoping it would be an anonymous hemp fabric sculpture or generic painting of ducks. No such luck: a dramatic and colorful painting by Richard Prince that guests routinely mistake for a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Value, only about $1 million.