Women Painters and the Vagaries of the Art Market

Last year, at Sotheby’s, the price of an Artemisia Gentileschi Self-Portrait in which she paints herself in the guise of Catherine of Alexandria with the martyr’s attributes of palm and spiked wheel, shot up to 2.4 million euros from an estimate of 300,000-400,000: appreciable progress towards equity in terms of prices. But the estimation and prices for works of art by women artists of the past are unstable, hypersensitive to changing climates and influenced by front page news, by scandals and stories of abuse, such as that of Harvey Weinstein, by hashtags like MeToo, and by changing moods, superstitions and political correctness: even a work by a great artist like Artemesia attains the “best offer” only if it contains references that may be linked to her fate as a woman who was sexually assaulted.