Art Market Analysis: The Booming Market for Female Artists
by Flavia Deakin
This week we are delighted to share a piece written for Studio Thoughts by our contributor and friend of the studio, Flavia Deakin.
—
In the run up to International Women’s Day, it felt appropriate that one of the stand-out works from last week’s major auctions of art in London was by the doyenne of Art Deco, Tamara de Lempicka; a slick portrait of her patron Dr. Boucard, which sold for £6.6 million. While Lempicka’s glamorous, mysterious portraits have had a cult following for many years, she is suddenly and undoubtedly ‘having a moment’. In 2024, along with a major retrospective at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, she was the subject of a Broadway musical, Lempicka, as well as a documentary The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival. Meanwhile, her market has rocketed. In 2011, the record price at auction for her work was £4.1 million, set with the sale of La Dormeuse from 1930. This record was repeatedly beaten in the years that followed, before the current benchmark of £16.3 million was set in 2020 with Portrait de Marjorie Ferry, 1932 — tripling the record in less than ten years.
This seemingly sudden prominence of an artist who was working nearly a century ago isn’t unique to Lempicka but is part of a visible, wider shift reappraising the work of female artists, long overlooked in the canon of art history. The work of individuals like Katy Hessel, with her popular podcast The Great Women Artists and 2022 bestseller The Story of Art Without Men, has done a great deal to launch this topic into public consciousness. However, looking at the data, this conversation comes in the midst of a market shift which was already underway. While the data for 2024 has not yet been published, 2023 was the third year in a row that global annual auction sales for works by women broke the $1 billion mark, totalling $1.3 billion — more than double the annual value sold a decade earlier.[1]
While this overdue correction is a step in the right direction, there’s still a long way to go: for example, while the market for Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell has shot from a world record at auction of $16.6 million in 2018 to nearly $30 million in November 2023, the auction records for her fellow Ab-Ex painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock are double that, at over $60 million. Likewise, a new auction record was set for a work by Modern British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 2022 and again in 2023 — now standing at $11.6 million. In contrast, the record for her contemporary Henry Moore is over $30 million. Although the needle is rapidly moving, we don’t yet value art by women in the way we do that by men.
However, with every challenge comes opportunity — and for canny investors looking to buy art, work by female artists is just that. While not every collector might be quite able to dip their toe into the balmy waters of eight-figure masterpieces (a girl can dream!) it’s clear that first-class works by female artists are currently available at lower price points than comparable works by male artists. However, if prices keep moving at this pace, things might not stay that way for long.
The opportunities don’t just lie in modern art. Institutional interest and a rising market often go hand-in-hand, and major museum shows and exhibitions in the past few years have helped to bring a range of female artists from across periods and genres into the foreground. From Old Masters like Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery in 2020-2021, to contemporary artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern in 2022-2023, whose enigmatic, muted portraits have become a mainstay of major art fairs and elite auctions, the appetite for work by women is wide-ranging. Endeavours such as FAMM in Mougins, France — the museum owned by British collector Christian Levett, who repurposed his museum of classical art into one dedicated to female artists — indicate the momentum and efforts being made to redress the balance.
In 2013, the artist Georg Baselitz famously said “women don’t paint very well”, later defending his comments by saying “the market doesn’t lie”. Perhaps if he were to look at the results of the last five years, he would realise that maybe the market just needed to open its eyes.
—
Flavia Deakin has over a decade of experience in the commercial art world and is an expert in analysing market trends. With a background in the art of the Middle East and South Asia, she now works on art from across categories, regions and time periods in her current role as EMEA Proposals Manager at Christie’s.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/flavia-deakin/