The Groove 251 - The Price of History: Why Women's Art Still Lags
Welcome to the 251st issue of The Groove.
I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.
If somebody forwarded you this email, please subscribe here, to get The Groove in your inbox for free every Tuesday.
THE PRICE OF HISTORY: WHY WOMEN’S ART STILL LAGS
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1613 will be offered at Christie’s New York in February 2026. It has an estimate of $2.5 - $3.5M
Everyone asks why work by women sells for less. The better question is: what, exactly, are we pricing? Not just pigment and provenance. We’re pricing centuries of people who had patrons, who had studios, who got shown, and who got written into history when museums were built out of royal collections and aristocratic taste. That scaffolding mattered and still does. Markets are memory machines before they are meritocracies.
Last week, a Gustav Klimt portrait from Leonard Lauder’s estate sold for $236.4M. Two nights later, Frida Kahlo’s 1940 El sueño (La cama) fetched $54.7M. Cue the comments: “Stop labeling male/female! Just call them artists!” Or the inverse: “Proof the market hates women!”
Both miss the deeper layers. Prices at the very top aren’t a referendum on virtue. They’re the outcome of supply, story, and scale meeting guarantees, marketing, and liquidity history in a single room.
Klimt’s lot had the full event economy behind it: a spectacular pedigree, restitution history (it had been seized by the Nazis and then restituted), a blue-chip collector’s estate, and an auction house geared to break a record; which it did.
So did Frida, who set the record for a work by a female artist. Someone who, even 40 years ago, was often treated as marginal and secondary to her husband, Diego Rivera. In contrast, Diego’s most expensive work sold at auction was The Rivals (1931) reaching $14.1M in 2022. History, indeed, can self-correct.
History As It Happened
The celebrity artist was invented in the Renaissance, so much so that we still talk about them without mentioning their last names: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael. They were amongst the first to sign their creations, receive big contracts and tackle majestic court commissions.
Women were largely excluded from the pipeline that still feeds value: guilds, apprenticeships, life drawing, large public commissions. The rare exceptions, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Sofonisba Anguissola, usually came through family studios or court appointments. Their achievements are real; their volume and scale of surviving work are not comparable to the male canon that museums later built on.
Those early exclusions didn’t just shape reputations; they shaped inventory. Courts and churches seeded the capital of Europe’s museums and collected men’s work at monumental scale. Those holdings became the backbone of national collections and, crucially, the comparables against which prices and guarantees are later underwritten.
Centuries later in the late 1800s, take for example Berthe Morisot, who along with Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond was one of the four official impressionist female artists. Morisot’s auction record is $10.9M (2013). On the other hand, Claude Monet boasts a record of $110.7 million. However, there’san issue of visibility and production that has to be mentioned. Morisot died at 54, having produced approximately 400 paintings. Monet died at 86, having made more than 2,300 canvases.
The work of these women artists isn’t lesser, but the infrastructure is. There was less scholarship, institutional scale, inventory depth, and decades of market-making.
Where the Gap Is Narrowing
Surrealism is the most dynamic correction zone now, led by Frida. Leonora Carrington comes second after vaulting to $28.5M in 2024; Dorothea Tanning also set a record last week at $3.2M.
That’s not a coincidence: a decade of strong museum shows, Venice Biennale highlights, and collectors who studied rather than scrolled built a floor and then a ceiling. But even here, there’s a huge imbalance compared to male Surrealists’ peak prices commanded by René Magritte L’empire des lumières, which sold for $121.2 million at Christie’s New York in 2024.
Postwar and Minimalism tell a similar story when support and supply discipline converge. Agnes Martin’s Grey Stone II reached $18.7M in 2023, a record driven by blue-chip provenance and curatorial consensus, proof that rigorous contexts move prices as much as narratives do. Louise Bourgeois’s Spider remains a top-tier benchmark at $32.8M, reminding everyone that when an artwork offers trophy-grade, institutionally validated works, the market pays accordingly.
On the contemporary side, this past May, Marlene Dumas's Miss January (1997) reached $13.63M, setting a new auction record. Dumas is also the first female living artist to enter the collection of The Louvre. Jenny Saville’s record $12.4 million and Julie Mehretu’s 2023 ($10.7M) didn’t come from novelty but sustained patronage, museum exposure, decades-long critical scaffolding, and works at the right scale and period. The through-line: when collectors, curators, , and supply control align, prices for women rise and stick.
The Shift
The claim of “it’s just art” and to stop labeling male/female sounds noble on a wall and naïve in practice. Gender determined who could train, what scale they could make, which patrons they reached, and how much survived. The question isn’t whether a gap exists, because it does. The question is why it persists, where it’s closing, and how to buy with conviction inside realities you can’t wish away.
The numbers are blunt: a widely cited peer-reviewed study from 2021 shows that across 1.9 million auction sales in 49 countries, paintings by women trade at a 42% discount.
But things are shifting: in 2024, women HNW collectors spent more on average than men and held a higher share of works by women - rising to a majority in the U.S. Millennials and Gen Z are the most open to new discoveries, which is where repricing starts.
The good news is that structure changes when the attestation changes. You can already see the repricing engine turning: museum calendars packed with women’s retrospectives, catalogues raisonnés closing voids, major estates and foundations getting professionalized, women collectors outspending where the case is strongest.
When evidence is visible on walls, in books, and in records, markets recalibrate. Not overnight, but inevitably.