A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.
When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for
$10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold
by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among
collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.
Yayoi
Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio
Inc.
YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living
female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at
auction.
A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a
bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times
the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether
talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's
boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged
behind those of their male counterparts.
Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at
auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices
for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes,
more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for
previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are
seeing their prices rise as a result.
"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony
Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors
aggressively buying work by women artists.
This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11
million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other
big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses
and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman
reports.
The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women
occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high
prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka,
Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen
Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.
Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings
will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at
Sotheby's
BID +2.20%and one
at Christie's.
"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with
prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity
bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and
contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.
Cindy
Sherman/Metro Pictures
CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction
world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale.
Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.
Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a
cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female
artwork.
Prominent women like Wal-Mart
WMT +1.47%heiress
Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and
songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a
national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost
entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are
underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise
Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every
period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.
Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for
undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big
group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the
European Fine Art Fair.
Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the
market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic
movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists
include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and
Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian
artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a
male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.
Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at
auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting
attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs
by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters
black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been
dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists
like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.
Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits
of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who
came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but
collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction
record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a
show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3
million, according to a gallery official.
The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how
collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male
counterparts.
Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and
bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers
like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York,
but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.
In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at
Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the
time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's
salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client
turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of
the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.
By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other
trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing
a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at
Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3
million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her
seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.'
"
Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman
artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs
in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block
next month at Christie's.
A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's
bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from
certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which
limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are
underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices.
Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows,
but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are
comprised largely of work by male artists.
Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists
are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based
dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen
Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy
events.
Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the
top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than
3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists,
according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date,
compared with scores of men.
One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like
Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period,
in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are
easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in
doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook,
a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.
Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted
away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly
sought-after.
In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas,
"After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted
back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece
is believed to have gone to an American.
The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and
cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a
Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood
in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco
paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw
famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years.
Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next
month's sales.
Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades
and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When
the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in
the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For
years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always
the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman,
Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.
Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the
artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style.
"I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email,
praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist
made her even more intriguing."
The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy
Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself
in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's
highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself
splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's
works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in
1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by
art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's
owner François Pinault.
An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today
than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who
pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a
friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko.
Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school.
"I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,'
and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "
Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
