Painted by a Woman

It was only in the 20th century that the mass of women became eligible (legally as well as culturally) to receive the highest levels of artistic training. Lee Krasner studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner’s work toward neo-cubist abstraction. When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, “This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.”

In 1985 a group of disgruntled women artists calling themselves “The Guerrilla Girls” wearing gorilla masks dashed around in the dead of night pasting West Broadway with posters that accused the art world of sexism and racism. One of their most famous posters had the provocative title “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” This poster was a response to the small number of women artists in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They found that a mere 5% of the artists were women but a staggering 85% of the nudes depicted were female. Their poster design was rejected by The Public Art Fund as a billboard so the Guerrilla Girls had it displayed in all the public buses in New York City.

The August 31, 2004 AskART magazine listing of the Top 100 American Auction Prices dating back to 1987 did not include one woman artist. However, in the autumn of 2006, the British art magazine Latest Art polled thirty experts to compose a list of the thirty greatest women artists ever. Artists on the list are both contemporary and historical, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Paula Rego, Judy Chicago, Annie Leibovitz and twenty others.

No matter how far women have come over the centuries their work is still not fetching the remarkable sums reached by their male counterparts. Top American female artists in order of strength of high-dollars-at-auction are: Georgia O’Keeffe ($6,166,000), Mary Cassatt ($4,072,500), Agnes Martin($2,584,000) Eva Hesse ($2,202,000), Lee Krasner ($1,911,500) and Joan Mitchell ($1,463,500). However, women still have catching up to do with men in the marketplace if they are to compare with these figures: Mark Rothko($72,840,000), Andy Wharhol ($71,720,000), George Wesley Bellows( 27,702, 500), Willem de Kooning($27,120,000), Edward Hopper(26,896,000).

Do these figures mean that men are better artists than women? Desmond Morris, who enraged feminists with his book “The Naked Ape”, had this to say “For every one great woman artist, there are 100 men. There are more male geniuses than female geniuses, and there are more male idiots than female idiots. If you’re a human female, you can’t afford to be a risk-taker and you can’t afford to be a dimwit. You have to be in between those two extremes.” He believed that the artistic dominance of men cannot be explained by social conditioning or by better opportunities. Throughout evolution it is women who have produced the most art but it has tended to be traditional art. The 80 year old writer, now a surrealist painter himself, believes that it is men who have flouted the rules and produced most of the great, mould-breaking art. .

Do you?