Of women and art
Women are receiving their dues in all sorts of fields these days. The one area that can’t be so obligingly regulated is the free market for art, writes
DESPITE the fact that their prices are going up, the top 20 prices paid at auctions in 2018 didn’t include any women at all. For top-end works, women tend to appear on the canvas, rather than doing the painting.
This is perhaps not so much discrimination as the ratio of male to female artists over the past millennium. Even in the progressive 20th century, it was still the men who dominated although women are getting their revenge occasionally.
Last year, one of the worldwide blockbuster exhibitions was Frida Kahlo, whose prices are going up while her husband Diego Rivera is getting less of the limelight. Similarly for Georgia O’Keefe and husband Alfred Stieglitz. He was the definitive photographer whose work fetches huge sums but they are still dwarfed by the prices for his wife’s work.
The woman whose work fetched the biggest price last year was an artist not everyone in Malaysia will be familiar with.
A Jenny Saville painting made US$12.4 million, which doesn’t even get her into the top 100 overall for 2018. Her gargantuan images of even more gargantuan female nudes cause a certain sense of panic in any environment; in Malaysia they would finish off the interest in women artists that is beginning to emerge.
Georgia O’Keefe is known for her Mexican settings and subtler approach to suggestive subject matter than Jenny Saville. This has made her more acceptable and therefore more bankable. Being an American helps, too, when it comes to achieving a figure of more than US$40 million for a flower painting.
Unlike male artists, almost all the leading ladies are from the 20th and 21st centuries. The men often go back much further, with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne fetching very high prices. The highest price of all belongs to a man who died exactly 500 years ago — Leonardo da Vinci and his US$450 million Salvator Mundi.
There are few acclaimed female artists from the time of Leonardo. Most who had any talent chose marriage over career and were forbidden from basic training such as studying nude models. One of the top names from the 17th century was Artemesia Gentileschi, who had to endure worse than being denied life-drawing classes. She was raped by her teacher and to prove her story in court then had to undergo judicial torture.
The 18th-century saw a more civilised approach, with two women becoming founding members of one of the world’s great art institutions — the Royal Academy. Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser still fetch high prices at auction, but nothing like their male contemporaries. Their French counterpart, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun set a world record last month for a pre-modern era woman artist.