Sunday, 6 July 2008

Laurie Lewis
Bridget Riley, with her painting Cataract

Women artists face prejudice and discrimination, with their works selling for a fraction of the price of their male counterparts, one of the world’s leading art dealers claimed yesterday.

Iwan Wirth, who represents the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, whose giant spider, Maman, became a landmark outside Tate Modern in London last year, said the huge gap in prices between the likes of Lucian Freud and Bourgeois was “a constant source of disappointment”.

Sales in London last week generated a fresh round of head-spinning prices: a Freud for £11.8m and a Jeff Koons sculpture for £13m. By comparison, the South African-born artist Marlene Dumas became the most expensive living woman artist at auction on Tuesday when her work The Visitor sold for £3.2m at Sotheby’s.

“It’s a constant source of disappointment to see the discrepancy in prices between outstanding female artists and their male counterparts,” Mr Wirth said.

“An artist’s gender should have nothing to do with their market value. I see this happen with the major artists we represent, such as Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell and Eva Hesse, who are exceptionally high-ranking artists.”

This week saw a new record price for the female British artist Bridget Riley, who sold for £2.5m at Sotheby’s. Bourgeois herself set the record for a living female artist in May this year when one of her spiders sold in Paris for £2.3m.

The Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova, who died in 1962, holds the record for the most expensive female artist sold at auction, with her Les Fleurs selling for £5.5m at Christie’s in June. Yet this pales in comparison with the £43m made by Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 in May – the most expensive piece of contemporary art sold at auction.

Mr Wirth complained that, while even the best-known female artists sell for around £2m-3m, lesser male artists make more money at auction: “Surely the art market, of all places, should be free of such prejudices. I was delighted to see an important painting by Dumas sell at Sotheby’s for £3.2m. However, one has to compare this with works from the same sale, which included a Bacon that sold for £13.7m, a [Jean-Michel] Basquiat for £5m and a Richard Prince for £4.2 m. Female artists are the bargain in today’s markets.”

The writer and sociologist Sarah Thornton, whose book on the art market will be published later this year, said that only 30 per cent of works in museums and galleries are by women, while the top 100 artists at auction in 2007 includes only four women, with the highest at No 49.

“You cannot equate the monetary value of art with the aesthetic worth of the artist,” she said. “One would expect the art world to be more egalitarian. It was only in 2004 that a living woman, Marlene Dumas, broke through the $1m barrier. At the top end of the market, the people who can afford to spend a lot are entrepreneurial men. And they buy entrepreneurial artists – Warhol, Hirst, Koons – artists they perhaps identify with.

“Second, it’s about volume. Women don’t tend to have factories of assistants churning out work. If you want to boost an artist’s price you need to bring their work to auction again and again. Women don’t usually work in that way.”

But the art critic Brian Sewell pointed out that, historically, women have done better in the art world than elsewhere. Throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, women artists were praised by male contemporaries. The likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, born in 1593, and her contemporary Fede Galizia were considered great painters of their day.

“The art market is not sexist,” Mr Sewell said. “The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist.

“Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children.”

Mr Wirth, however, believes things could change. “The problem has been that female artists have been historically excluded from museums,” he told The Art Newspaper. “Now there are more female curators and a new generation of male curators rewriting art history.”

Pilar Ordovas, the head of contemporary art at Christie’s, also rejected claims the market is sexist. “There are many male artists who sell for the same as women,” she said. “It is too simplistic to suggest that gender or age determines price.”

The post There’s never been a great woman artist first appeared on Indian Art News.

The ‘stunning’ piece, which soared above its pre-sale estimate of £1-1.5 million, “embodies the pioneering manipulation of space and material that characterises the very best output of this world-renowned sculptor.” The untitled sculpture is one of Kapoor’s largest alabaster works and the first double-concave piece to come to auction.

Among other Indian works, Subodh Gupta’s untitled work, created in 2005, catapulted above its pre-sale estimate of £2,00,000-3,00,000, selling for £6,01,250. The untitled canvas, depicting a vessel stall glistening in the pink dawn of sunrise, is one of Gupta’s most important and powerful photo-realist paintings to ever come to the market.

Bharti Kher made her debut appearance at the Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Contemporary Art. Her sculpture, ‘Misdemeanours’, executed in fibreglass, wood and fur, saw bidding from six bidders and finally realised £75,650, against an estimate of £40,000-60,000.

The sale, overall, achieved a phenomenal sum of £94.702 million ($188.854 million) against a pre-sale estimate of £67.4-96.6 million making it the most successful summer sale of contemporary art in Europe. The sale had numerous high points, with records achieved by 11 different artists.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art, Sotheby’s Europe and Oliver Barker, senior international specialist, Sotheby’s contemporary art department, told ET in an email from London: “We are elated with the results of the sale, the highest ever Summer sale of contemporary art in Europe. We saw 11 records tumble, including ones for Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley, Richard Prince and Anish Kapoor, in front of a hugely energetic and packed saleroom.”

“The top lot of the sale was Francis Bacon’s exquisite small-scale study for head of George Dyer, which sold for £13.7 million. We are also extremely happy with the result achieved for the group of twelve works from the Lauffs Collection, which achieved a total of £18.9 million, almost triple the pre-sale low estimate of £6.4 million. Once again, we are witnesses to a market that is driven by art lovers. Buyers have confidence in the artworks they are competing for, and have shown unprecedented determination to win the lots which they desire.”

Incidentally, the portrait of John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal by Andy Warhol, depicting McEnroe and O’Neal in their mid-1980s prime, sold for £241,250. Gifted by McEnroe himself, the proceeds will be donated by the tennis star for the benefit of habitat for humanity, which provides not-for-profit housing through the help of volunteers.

The post Records tumble at Sotheby’s auction first appeared on Indian Art News.