Gender gap narrows on canvas, but India still to catch up on trend

As volume of work as well as prices fetched by women artists in global auctions improve

Amrita Sher-Gil, Potrait, Art, Indian Artists — Among Indian female artists, Amrita Sher-Gil’s In the Ladies’ Enclosure (1938) recorded the highest price (Rs 38 crore). Photo Courtesy: Saffronart

4 min read Last Updated : Jul 04 2022 | 6:07 AM IST

In May this year, a Sotheby’s event in New York witnessed a landmark — women artists outnumbered men at the auction house’s evening sale for the first ever.

Some 60 per cent of the works assembled had been created by women, a 55 per cent increase on the equivalent sale last November.

It is true that while female artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Jenny Saville and Frida Kahlo have made it to the list of the most popular and best-selling artists worldwide, they are yet to match the likes of Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh in terms of value. But it’s not been just the volumes of women’s artworks that have been growing at auctions.

Last year, the Sotheby’s Mei Moses Index — a preeminent measure of the art market — reported that over the previous five years, prices for female artists had grown by 32 per cent, outpacing growth for male artists by 29 per cent. The index also found that the growth for contemporary female artists over the same period grew by 66 per cent, as against 17 per cent for male artists.

In India, the encouraging trend is yet to pick up although there are signs of growing inclusiveness.

In recent years, for example, the record-breaking names among male artists include V S Gaitonde (Rs 48 crore), Tyeb Mehta (Rs 42 crore) and F N Souza (Rs 30 crore). For female artists, the numbers have been impressive but are still lagging in comparison to men, as evidenced by the best-selling works that include ones by Amrita Sher-Gil (Rs 38 crore), Arpita Singh (Rs 8 crore) and Nasreen Mohamedi (Rs 4 crore).

Arpita Singh comes a distant second for her mural, Wish Dream, which had a price tag of Rs 9.5 crore

Dinesh Wazirani, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Saffronart auction house, says that in India the top-selling artists now and even historically have been male for a couple reasons. One, a possible gender bias between the 1940s and 1960s, essentially a period during which a majority of India’s modern and contemporary masters had been born and raised. Second, he adds, many female artists may have simply “dropped out of the race” in pursuing their careers.

Rakhi Sarkar, who runs the Kolkata-based Centre of International Modern Art gallery, concurs.

According to her, if a sample survey of any art college or university at the time were done it would most certainly show a ratio of male to female artists skewed in favour of the former. “In a sense, women artists would have found it harder to take the bold risk of living a nomadic life in which they experiment with styles in pursuit of learning and honing their craft. But it was more acceptable for men to do the same; it would be seen, in a philosophical sense, as ‘hunting’.”

In the present day, however, there is no shortage of women artists — both established and emerging ones — with the potential to become the front-runners for auctions and collectors.

The list of the most vaunted contemporary women Indian artists includes Anjolie Ela Menon, Meera Mukherjee, Sheba Chhachhi, Nalini Malani, Anupama Sud and Shreyashi Chatterjee, Sarkar adds.

As opposed to a few decades ago, there are also more artist couples today. Among such notable pairs are Jitish and Reena Kallat, Paresh Maity and Jayasri Burman, Atul and Anju Dodiya, and Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher. That in itself is a step forward from the yesteryears, when the spouses of the best-known artists lived in their shadows.

Secondly, some of the most celebrated artists — including M F Hussain, Souza, Gaitonde and S H Raza — continue to fetch jaw-dropping prices posthumously and would be multiple generations older than the seniors alive today, Vazirani notes. This suggests a generational change of guard is likely to lead to a better gender balance.