Here's why female artists are going through the roof

Often marginalized, overshadowed by their male counterparts and less taken into account by institutions, women artists of the past are attracting growing interest on the art market. Celebrated by scholars, rediscovered by museums and showcased in major exhibitions, they are now breaking auction records.

Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou (2021), Pioneers at the Tate Modern (2022) are just some of the exhibitions that demonstrate this dynamic.

In her 1971 article " Why haven't there been any great women artists ? ", Linda Nochlin attempted to point out the structural obstacles to the invisibilization of women in art history, linked in particular to academies, commissioning, academic nudity and the gallery network. However, the bouquets of Anne Vallayer-Coster and the lyrical abstraction of Janett Sobel have nothing to envy their male counterparts.

Rereading art history has pushed the reintegration of forgotten figures, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and many others, whose works promise great auctions.

Record auction sales testify to a reawakening of the market.

-      Paula Modersohn-Becker's Die Tänzerin (circa 1923) topped €6 million in 2023 at Grisebach, Berlin.

-      La Récolte des haricots (1885) by Rosa Bonheur sold for 2.1 million euros at Sotheby's in 2022.

-      In 2018, a work by Frida Kahlo, Diego y yo, topped $34.9 million at Sotheby's New York - a record for a Latin American artist.

These figures, which may seem far from a Dubuffet or a Pollock, already illustrate an upward slope that is fueled by growing international demand.

A critical rereading is being carried out by institutions and researchers, such as Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock or Whitney Chadwick have contributed to revaluing the history of women artists. Museums have followed suit: MoMA, the National Gallery in London and the Musée d'Orsay have integrated these artists into their programming, if not completely overhauled it. The proliferation of academic monographs has also established this visibility.

The women artists that the art world is rediscovering are the vector of a long-term speculative dynamic, with collectors looking for values that are still accessible in a sometimes saturated market.

Many women artists are still underpriced compared to their male counterparts. The scarcity effect also comes into play, as works available on the market are rarer, and therefore more coveted. Regional museums, foundations and patrons are already directing their acquisitions to achieve greater historical parity in their collections.

The art market has already highlighted numerous emblematic cases of posthumous rediscovery, which have fueled research :

-      Hilma af Klint, virtually unknown before 2013, is today considered a pioneer of abstraction. One work sold for over 1.3 million euros in 2023.

-      Alice Neel, long relegated to marginal status, saw her stock rise after her retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. One of her paintings fetched over €4 million in 2022.

-      Lavinia Fontana, a court painter in the 16th century, recently saw one of her canvases exceed €400,000 - an unthinkable amount twenty years ago for a woman of this era.

It's not a question of rewriting history or banking on the works of female artists to make a " historical catch-up ", but of taking into account a correction of the canon that follows the logics proper to art history. For them, but also for the history of art in its entirety, for the coherence of artistic movements and the wealth of theories that have shaped the market's greatest currents.

Many women artists are now simply and rightly placed in their exact historical context, not as exceptions - which they never were and still aren't - but as full-fledged players in major currents. Berthe Morisot was not an Impressionist painter; she was a co-founder of the group and exhibited as early as 1874.

Natalia Goncharova is today identified as a co-founder of Rayonism (predating Suprematism), whereas she was long presented as marginal. Sonia Delaunay is reassessed in the genesis of Orphic colored abstraction.

These are clarifications and contextualizations that have a direct impact on the quotation, because they restore historical continuity. Collectors are indeed keen to buy names that are integrated into a marked-out history (futurism, cubism, abstraction, neo-classicism).

The heightened visibility enjoyed by many of these works currently in leading exhibitions is a decisive driver of artists' valuations. Indeed, the valuation cycle begins in museums, since a well-received monographic or thematic exhibition, accompanied by a rigorous catalog, always precedes a significant price rise. A few examples :

-      Paula Modersohn-Becker, after her retrospectives in Bremen (2007) and then Paris (2016), saw her works rise from 500,000 to over 5 million euros (Grisebach, 2023).

-      The Hilma af Klint retrospective at the Guggenheim (2019) not only broke attendance records, but more importantly saw her works top the million mark in private sales.

-      Maruja Mallo, rediscovered in the wake of Spanish surrealism, is now seeing her works enter major museum collections - a prelude to future valorization.

Keep in mind that a quotation is rarely born of the market alone, but is very often manufactured by the institutions.

For the moment, supply is extremely limited and controlled. Most women artists have left a limited output. There are few works in circulation, as museums have absorbed a large proportion of the works, causing tension on the supply side. To this must be added an often impeccable provenance, as the works often remained in the family or were passed down in direct line. This is an increasingly scrutinized factor for buyers. It is therefore a typical market configuration for sustained price rises (low supply, high quality and institutional rarity).

Prices are still undervalued compared with equivalent male profiles. There are still significant price differentials between artists with the same historical impact. Collectors therefore perceive these differences as opportunities for revaluation, allowing the market to act through arbitrage. Growing interest in museums and academia also gives these artists a lasting value, as catalogs raisonnés are now available for more and more artists, and the works are increasingly well documented.

Many objective criteria are converging in this way. The rise in the status of women artists today can be explained by a clear combination of factors. Firstly, a rigorous historical reinsertion into the major currents, a sustained museum institution with exhibition cycles, a scarcity of supply and a solid provenance that are conducive to investment, and finally a sometimes unjustified price differential compared to equivalent artists, which attracts high-end speculation.

So, it's indeed not a question of adding a few forgotten names to a list, but neither is it a question of rewriting the whole story. For art and art history, it's about enriching currents, establishing links between the works of Jean Metzinger and Anne Dangar, from Janet Sobel and from Jackson Pollock, enrich research and highlight works that deserve to be seen, collected and bought, because they are certainly a unique piece of a current and celebrate at every turn the talent of the artist who created it.