A self-portrait by renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is poised to make history when it goes up for auction this week, potentially becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold by a female artist. The surrealist painting "El sueño (La cama)" - "The Dream (The Bed)" - is being offered by a private collector at Sotheby's in New York on November 20, with experts estimating it could fetch between $40 million and $60 million.
The current record for the highest-priced work by a female artist belongs to Georgia O'Keeffe's 1932 painting "Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1," which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. Kahlo already holds the second-highest auction record for a female artist, with her 1949 self-portrait "Diego y yo" ("Diego and I"), featuring her husband, artist Diego Rivera, selling for $34.9 million in 2021.
However, even if Kahlo's painting reaches its upper valuation estimate, it will represent just a fraction of the record for male artists. Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" sold for an astronomical $450.3 million at Christie's in 2017, highlighting the massive gender disparity that continues to plague the art world.
The gender gap extends far beyond historical artists to contemporary creators as well. Earlier this year, South African artist Marlene Dumas set a new record for the highest amount paid for a living female artist when her large-scale portrait "Miss January," depicting a semi-nude woman, sold for $13.6 million in May. This surpassed the previous record held by Jenny Saville's "Propped," which sold for $12.4 million in 2018. Yet Dumas's record represents less than 15% of the current record for a living male artist - Jeff Koons's "Rabbit" sculpture, which sold for just over $91 million in 2019.
Experts point to a complex web of factors contributing to this persistent disparity, including deeply rooted misogyny, ageism, and the male-dominated nature of auction houses and museums. A groundbreaking 2021 study published in The Review of Financial Studies provided stark evidence of gender bias in art valuation. Renée B. Adams, a professor of finance at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School and lead author of "Gendered Prices," conducted an experiment showing two groups of participants identical AI-generated artworks. One group saw the works attributed to male artists, while the other saw them attributed to female artists. The results were telling: regular gallery-goers consistently rated the supposedly male-created works higher than those apparently made by women.
"The art market blows all the gender wage gap numbers out of the water," Adams explained. "The discount in art prices is not driven by merit, but by factors related to societal perceptions of women. It has nothing to do with whether the painting is good or bad." Adams's ongoing research into secret postcard auctions, where artists' identities are supposedly anonymous, further reinforces this finding. "If buyers can't infer identity, there's no gender difference in price, but as soon as they think they know who the person is, there's a gender difference in price," she noted.
Artist, writer, and art historian Helen Gørrill took a forensic approach to examining this phenomenon for her 2020 book "Women Can't Paint." She created a comprehensive spreadsheet analyzing 5,000 paintings sold at major auction houses including Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips. Her findings were startling: "Art signed by a man went up in value compared to unsigned work, and women's artwork actually went down in value when signed," she told CNN.
Gørrill argues that the art establishment strategically highlights the success of artists like Saville, Kahlo, Bridget Riley, and Yayoi Kusama to create an illusion of progress. "The ones that are doing really well are being held up as an example of how well women are doing, but when you analyze it, we're not at all," she said. "In the '90s, we had far more women succeeding. Now the success is being shared by far fewer women, but on a greater scale."
Perhaps most troubling are the biological prejudices that continue to affect women artists' market value. Gørrill's latest research reveals that dealers and collectors lose confidence in female artists once they become mothers. "I spoke to some big dealers and they all said their collectors lose trust in women once they've had a kid because they're no longer going to be able to focus fully on their artwork," she explained. "So the value of a woman artist essentially dips because of biology." This belief has been internalized even by successful female artists like Tracey Emin, who stated in a 2014 interview: "There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men."
Ageism and beauty standards present additional obstacles for women in the art world. Gørrill recounted speaking with one artist who was advised by a dealer to get Botox because she "looked haggard." As the artist told Gørrill: "Her exact words to me were, 'but men are allowed to be old and ugly.'"
Museums bear significant responsibility for perpetuating these inequalities, according to experts. "By museums not collecting as many female artists as men, it has a massive impact on collections and on values attributed on the secondary market to artwork, and also what collectors perceive as being valuable or validated as an artwork," Gørrill explained.
Despite these systemic challenges, some collectors and institutions are working to address the imbalance. Italian art collector and patron Valeria Napoleone has spent nearly three decades building a collection focused exclusively on women artists. Starting in 1997, when she couldn't understand why women were marginalized simply because of gender, she set out to "create a choir of female voices who have been silenced throughout art history." Today, her collection comprises approximately 560 artworks spread between homes and storage units in London, New York, and Milan.
"While the discourse in the wider art world around gender equality has changed, there remains a black hole when it comes to museums and auction houses," Napoleone observed. "As radical as the world of contemporary art is believed to be, it's a male-dominated field in terms of artists, museums, directors - the whole ecosystem. For me, it's very important to readdress art history through the eyes of a new generation of curators."
Institutions dedicated to women's art are also playing a crucial role in changing perceptions. Harriet Loffler, curator at The Women's Art Collection at Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University - Europe's largest collection of women's art - remains optimistic about progress. "These success stories are fantastic for women artists," she said, welcoming the attention generated by the Kahlo auction. The collection, which houses works by luminaries including Barbara Hepworth, Mary Cassatt, Paula Rego, and Tracey Emin, represents "a constellation, not stars," according to Loffler. "The artists aren't all talking about what it is to be a woman, but they all have something to say."
Across the Atlantic, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., established in the 1980s, continues its mission to rectify historical underrepresentation. Kathryn Wat, the museum's chief curator and deputy director for art, programs and public engagement, emphasizes the ongoing need for advocacy. "While women artists have greater recognition now, disparities in scholarly research, the content of museum collections, and market value persist," she explained. "Statistically, women artists continue to be undervalued and overlooked by the broader art market."
Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby's, acknowledges the challenges while noting positive developments. "In recent years, we've witnessed a real and measurable shift - not just in awareness, but also in market confidence and increasing gallery representation and institutional support for women artists," she said. Outstanding results have been achieved by other female artists, including O'Keeffe and Lee Krasner, suggesting momentum for change.
As Kahlo's "El sueño (La cama)" prepares to potentially break records, it represents both progress and the long road ahead. While such high-profile sales bring important visibility to women artists, they also highlight the persistent structural inequalities that continue to undervalue women's contributions to art history. The challenge now lies in translating individual success stories into systemic change that ensures equal recognition and compensation for female artists across all levels of the art market.
