Georgia O'Keefe Painting Breaks Sale Record for a Female Artist

Last May, a painting by Joan Mitchell from 1960 became the top grossing painting by a female artist in history when it sold for $11.9 million. At a recent auction this record was broken when Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” sold for $44,405,000. This beat O’Keeffe’s previous sale record of $6.2 million by a landslide! Now these may seem like exorbitant sums of money for anyone to pay for a painting, but it is still a fraction of the price that the works of top male artists go for at auction.

Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1
image courtesy of Sotheby's

A little over a year ago Francis Bacon’s painting, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud," broke the record for the most paid for a work of art in a public auction when it sold for $142.4 million. Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players” holds the record of most expensive painting sold. It sold for $250 million in 2011. A list compiled of “the top 10 lots by women artists sold at auction” only has 5 sales that go over $10 million. Wikipedia’s list of most expensive paintings (as of November 2014) does not include any sales less than $60 million. It also does not include any works by female artists. So are female artists not as valued as male artists? Art critic Jonathan Jones feels strongly that the answer is yes:

Even as modern society has changed, and the structures  that controlled art before the modern age - suddenly, in the early 20th century women became far more visible as participants in such movements as dadaism and surrealism - the achievements of women as artists have been subtly underplayed and undervalued. They still are today, in the age when names such as Richter and Kiefer have so much more cache, somehow, than Emin or Sherman or Whiteread, and so many more TV programs are made about David Hockney than they are about Bridget Riley. Women are allowed to do art, nowadays, of course. They are just not permitted to be great at it.

An article in Blouin Artinfo from 2012 featured interviews with several women within the art world and addressed whether the trend of male artists outselling female artists is changing. Linda Blumberg, the Executive Director of the Art Dealers Association of America, acknowledged the slow but steady progress of gender equality stating, "I think it is a general cultural attitude. It was reflected in the workplace, it was reflected in the art world, it was reflected in all kinds of areas. As that began to change culturally, it began to seep in all over." Art gallery owner Gwenolee Zurcher seconds this opinion saying that "right now, today, there are so many good women artists, They do get some attention but obviously they could get more... there is definitely change taking place in the culture and the market for women artists, but... the process is painfully slow."