A New Study Has Simple Advice for Collectors Looking for Big Returns on Art: Invest In Women

Although the price for women’s artworks at auction still lag far
behind those of their male counterparts, there is one segment of
the market where women are taking the lead, finds a new study from
Sotheby’s Mei Moses. When it comes to works
traded on the auction market, women’s prices are rising at a much
faster rate than prices for works by men.

The study, published in the
latest issue of the online publication In Other Words by Sotheby’s
subsidiary Art Agency
Partners, considers works sold more than once, comparing
the price differential for art by women—in the All Art-Female
index—to that of work by men—in the All Art-Male index.

Sotheby’s Mei Moses found that between 2012 and 2018, sales
results rose just eight percent for men, while women saw the price
for their work go up an astonishing 73 percent. By
comparison, the study found that resale markets for men and women
had been about the same over the 50 previous years. Contemporary
women artists active after 1945 saw the biggest
boost, reselling for 87.7 percent more than their male peers.
Other female artists outperformed the men by 30.7 percent.

Works by women remain a tiny minority of all the art sold at
auction. In 2018, 92 percent of all lots and 95 percent of the
total value of art sold at auction was created by men, according to
the Art Basel and UBS Global
Art Market Report 2019.

Similarly, the number of resold works by men still far
outstrips those by women. The Mei Moses study included 2,472 repeat
sales by 499 female artists, compared to 55,706 repeat sales by
8,477 male artists, both over the last seven years.

Even the priciest paintings by women, from artists including
Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, and Cecily Brown, failed to crack the
list of the 100 most-expensive works of last year. And while Jenny
Saville became the most expensive living
female artist with the $12.4 million sale of
Propped in 2018, her male counterpart, David Hockney, hit
the far loftier figure of $90 million with the
Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures).

Be that as it may, the new study suggests that the stock of
women artists is rising fast. Why have women been doing so
much better on the resale market?

Blue-chip art in general is a scarce resource. With a
lot of the supply of works by established names tapped out,
art collectors are having to dig deeper into art history to find
works to add to their holdings. Increasingly, that pressure is
bringing attention to previously unexplored niches, including
undervalued women artists, who are also being rediscovered by
museums and curators. And because women’s work has been overlooked
for so long, there is nowhere for their market to go but up—hence
recent new records for previously overlooked Abstract
Expressionists Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, or Sotheby’s promoting female Old
Masters like Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le
Brun (with an assist from Victoria
Beckham).

“There could be many different reasons for our findings—maybe
different cultural factors playing in the way that people are
looking at art,” Michael Klein, the head of the Sotheby’s Mei
Moses, told the Art Newspaper.
“The bottom line is that the demand for female artists is
growing.”

Founded by NYU Stern professors Jianping Mei and
David Moses in 2000, the Mei Moses Art Indices focuses
solely on repeat sales, allowing users to track the price of an
artwork over time. The analytic tool was acquired by
Sotheby’s in 2016.

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Big Returns on Art: Invest In Women appeared first on artnet
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