Blood, gold, and silence: When women artists rewrite art history
The Sotheby’s auction room that July evening in 2023 hummed like a hive before a storm. Beneath the crystal chandeliers, a seventeenth-century canvas awaited its fate: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. The gavel fell at $24.2 million—a record for a female artist of the Baroque era. Twelve years earlier, the same work had sold for $6 million. Between those two bids, far more than a transaction had unfolded: the redemption of an artist raped at seventeen, whose father had tried to erase her earliest paintings, and whose genius had long been attributed to Caravaggio. That night, the art market finally acknowledged what museums had denied for four centuries: women were not muses, but creators.
By Artedusa
••9 min readYet behind this triumph lies a more complex truth. While prices soar, the works remain rare—less than 1% of major museum acquisitions before 1900 are by women artists. And when a painting like Gentileschi’s reaches such heights, it is often because it carries the scars of a painful history. The blood spattering the canvas is not only Holofernes’. It also tells the story of an artist who had to fight for every brushstroke, every exhibition, every scrap of recognition.
So how do you invest in this booming market without falling into the trap of speculation? Where do you find the hidden gems before they explode? And above all, how do you distinguish a work that will appreciate from a mere media bubble?
01The Renaissance had forgotten its daughters
Picture Florence in the sixteenth century. The scaffolding of Santa Maria del Fiore climbs toward the sky, Michelangelo carves his David, and in her father’s studio, a seventeen-year-old girl learns to mix pigments. Artemisia Gentileschi was not allowed to paint nudes—the academies were closed to her. Yet she already mastered chiaroscuro better than most of her male contemporaries. When her father introduced her to Agostino Tassi, a renowned painter, it was to teach her perspective. What he taught her was violence.
The trial that followed in 1612 is a chilling document. We hear a young woman describe, under oath, the details of her rape, while her attacker denies it with arrogance. The court subjects her to the sibilli—ropes that bind the fingers until they break—to test the truth of her words. She holds firm. Sentenced to exile, Tassi gets off lightly. Artemisia, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a mediocre painter to “save her honor.”
Yet it is from this pain that her masterpiece is born. Judith Beheading Holofernes is not just a biblical scene. It is pictorial vengeance. Unlike the male versions, where Judith seems almost indifferent, Artemisia paints a determined woman, sleeves rolled up, muscles taut. The blood spurts in perfect arcs, as if she had studied the anatomy of arteries. Critics of the time called the painting “too violent for a woman.” Four centuries later, it is precisely that violence that makes it a major work.
02The Impressionists had a shadow
When Berthe Morisot exhibited The Cradle at the 1874 Salon, critics were unanimous: “Charming, but so feminine.” What they did not see was the revolution hidden in those light brushstrokes. Morisot, the only woman in the Impressionist group alongside Mary Cassatt, had to fight to be taken seriously. Manet, her brother-in-law, retouched her canvases without asking. Monet and Renoir earned ten times more than she did for similar works.
Yet it is in the intimacy of her paintings that Morisot invents something radical. Look at Woman at Her Toilette: the young woman is not posing; she is gazing at herself in a fogged mirror, caught in the act of self-examination. The composition is so tight that you feel as if you are in the room with her. Morisot paints what men do not see—moments when women are not objects of desire, but simply human beings.
Her secret? A revolutionary technique. She prepared her canvases with a gray ground that made light stand out, and used brushstrokes so quick they seem applied in a single breath. Today, her works fetch millions at auction, but in museum storerooms, dozens of paintings still await rediscovery. Some bear fingerprints—hers, likely, when she adjusted a shadow at the last moment.
03Surrealism had a queen
Frida Kahlo did not like being called a Surrealist. “I don’t paint dreams,” she said, “I paint my reality.” Yet when André Breton discovered her work in 1938, he immediately saw it as the manifesto of the movement. What he did not understand was that Kahlo was not playing with the unconscious—she was fighting it.
In The Broken Column, painted after spinal surgery, she depicts herself with a body pierced by nails, an Ionic column shattered in place of her spine. The surrounding desert is not a backdrop, but a state of mind. Kahlo used personal symbols—monkeys, roots, veins spilling from bodies—as a secret language. Her bright colors are not cheerful: blood-red evokes pain, emerald green decay.
For decades, her art was reduced to her marriage to Diego Rivera. Museums displayed her works alongside his, as if she were merely an appendage of his genius. It was not until the 1980s, with the rise of feminism, that her work was reassessed. Today, Diego and I holds the record for a Latin American artist, but in the storerooms of the Museo Frida Kahlo, hundreds of drawings and sketches remain unstudied. Some reveal unsettling details: self-portraits where she depicts herself with tears of blood, or split bodies as in The Two Fridas.
04Abstraction had a pioneer
In 1906, while Kandinsky was still painting figurative landscapes, a forty-four-year-old Swedish woman completed a series of abstract canvases. Hilma af Klint never showed them in her lifetime. “The world is not ready,” she wrote in her journal. For eighty years, her works remained in boxes, until an art historian rediscovered them in 1986.
What she found was astonishing: giant spirals, biomorphic forms, vibrant colors that seemed to come from another world. Af Klint did not paint landscapes, but “messages” received during séances. Her Ten Largest, a series of ten monumental canvases, represents the stages of humanity’s spiritual evolution. Yet when the Moderna Museet in Stockholm organized her first retrospective in 2013, visitors were stunned. How could a woman have invented abstraction before Kandinsky?
The answer is simple: because she had nothing to prove. Unlike her male contemporaries, af Klint was not trying to revolutionize art. She painted for herself, in the secrecy of her studio. Today, her canvases fetch millions at auction, but the real treasure lies in her notebooks. Hundreds of pages of notes, sketches, reflections on color and form. A complete body of work, ignored for a century, still waiting to be fully understood.
05The market has its pitfalls
Investing in women’s art is like walking through a minefield. On one hand, the opportunities are vast: undervalued artists, rare works, a rapidly expanding market. On the other, the risks are real. Fakes abound, attributions are often dubious, and some bubbles seem ready to burst.
Take Tamara de Lempicka. Her Art Deco portraits, with their sleek lines and saturated colors, have become icons. Autoportrait in the Green Bugatti sold for $9.1 million in 2020. Yet the market is flooded with forgeries. How do you spot them? Study the details: Lempicka used a very pure ultramarine blue, and her cast shadows were always slightly offset. Forgers tend to exaggerate the contrasts.
Another trap: artists “in fashion.” Yayoi Kusama is a safe bet, but her Infinity Nets reach stratospheric prices. Better to turn to lesser-known artists like Lee Krasner or Sonia Delaunay. Their works are just as powerful, but far less expensive.
Finally, beware of questionable attributions. Many paintings by women have been credited to their husbands or teachers. In 2017, a canvas long attributed to Frans Hals was revealed to be the work of Judith Leyster, a seventeenth-century Dutch painter. The price difference? Several million dollars.
06Where to find the hidden gems?
Museums are a good starting point. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, or Tate Modern in London regularly organize exhibitions on women artists. But the real discoveries happen elsewhere: in small galleries, regional auctions, or even flea markets.
In 2019, a collector bought a painting attributed to a minor nineteenth-century artist for €5,000. After expert analysis, it turned out to be a work by Marie Bracquemond, a forgotten Impressionist. Today, that canvas is worth over €500,000.
Catalogues raisonnés are another valuable resource. Berthe Morisot’s, published in 2012, revealed dozens of unknown works. Frida Kahlo’s, on the other hand, is incomplete—hundreds of drawings and sketches are missing from it.
Online auctions, like those at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, also offer interesting opportunities. But beware: prices can vary wildly depending on provenance. A Rosa Bonheur painting with a prestigious history (like a Metropolitan Museum collection) will sell for far more than a similar work without a traceable past.
07The future has a name
If you want to invest in women’s art, here are a few avenues to explore:
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Forgotten modernists: Lee Krasner, whose abstract canvases rival Pollock’s but cost ten times less. Or Sonia Delaunay, whose colorful fabrics and paintings are being rediscovered.
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Non-Western artists: Amrita Sher-Gil, a twentieth-century Indian painter whose works fetch millions. Or Pan Yuliang, a Chinese artist who fled war to settle in France.
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Promising contemporary artists: Julie Mehretu, whose dynamic abstract paintings are in high demand. Or Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose hybrid collages explore Nigerian-American identity.
But the real treasure may lie elsewhere: in museum archives, family attics, or the notebooks of forgotten artists. In 2020, a painting by the Baroque Italian artist Orsola Maddalena Caccia was rediscovered in a Piedmontese church. No one knew she had painted such powerful still lifes.
Art history is being rewritten. And this time, women have their place in it. It’s up to you to decide if you want to be part of it.