Total Eclipse Of The Art

Glancing Into the Annals of History, Hello! Observes the Gender Gaps Between Male and Female Artists, Marking How the Male of Our Species Has Often Outperformed His Female Counterpart at Auction…
 

- Jeena J Billimoria

Let’s begin this article with the following fact: the world auction record for a female artist stands at US$44.4 million. It’s a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe and it’s a very impressive sum of money. A painting by Leonardo da Vinci however, as we’re all aware, sold for US$450 million last year – setting a new world record for the most expensive painting sold at auction. Naturally, one would be quick to object that you cannot compare two artists in varied leagues and historical timelines, disregard the rarity of an artists’ work, the market structure itself and several other factors that would contribute to and aid sound argument. And while this is true, history has also shown us in bold black and white, that between the sexes, the males have emerged the winners when the hammer has struck, leaving women a few steps behind. If you pause to think about it, the art that we consider to be the most valuable, monetarily as well as culturally, is almost all by men. Several museums across the world considered to have the greatest collections are the ones that boast works by Turner, Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock, Koons and Hirst. That a female counterpart for each of these artists doesn’t roll off the tongue as fluently, just drives home the point as smoothly as a paintbrush gliding across a canvas. And if you reverse even further down the lanes of history, you’d recognise names like Caravaggio, Titian, Botticelli, da Vinci and Michelangelo more than Plautilla Nelli (her Biblical paintings were masterpieces but surprise surprise – she was written out of the Renaissance history books and dismissed as just another nun with access to a paintbrush).

HELLO! looks at some extremely noteworthy artist couples for whom this has rung true, and uncovers the presence of a gender bias that lives and breathes even in the creative, limitless, unadulterated and fantastic world of art!