Marlene Dumas just had the highest sale ever recorded for a living female artist

When you think of influential contemporary artists working today, who do you think of? And of that list, how many are women?

As author and columnist Katy Hessel wrote in her 2022 book The Story of Art Without Men, a 2019 study showed that “in the collections of eighteen major US art museums, 87 per cent of artworks were by men, and 85 per cent by white artists.” So would you know that Marlene Dumas, a South African painter who lives in The Netherlands and has been painting for over 50 years, is one of the most influential artists working today? Would you know that she is so influential her 1997 painting Miss January just became the most expensive work ever sold by a living female artist?

Standing at over nine feet tall and more than three feet wide, Miss January depicts a blonde woman with dark eyes, “nude from the waist down save for a single pink sock,” as The Art Newspaper wrote. The work would be sold at Christie’s auction house, at an anticipated range of $12-18 million dollars. If the work reached this threshold, it would be “highest price at auction for an artwork by a living female artist,” the auction house wrote. According to Sara Friedlander, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Miss January is Dumas’s “magnum opus.” Indeed, the auction house later wrote on Instagram that the work “threads the line between revealing and concealing, and serves as perhaps the best example of her influential female portraiture.”

The work did reach this threshold, and sold for $13.6M with fees, $11.5m without, The Art Newspaper reported. The publication added that though the auction was otherwise a quiet one, the works that received the top bids were all by women artists and that “tonight was a story of women,” as art adviser Wendy Cromwell told them. Still, despite all her accolades, Dumas is not a household name the way some of her contemporaries are, according to Artnet. Even so, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Dumas has shown her work, which features potent and sometimes cheeky depictions of people across all walks of life, in museums around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, among many others. As Hessel wrote on Instagram in time for the Christie’s auction, Dumas “is acute at creating an evocative smoke-like texture that leaves you spellbound. Her paintings feel like memories or images lodged in the back of your mind.”

In 2021, museum director Donatien Grau perhaps described Dumas’s influence best to the BBC. “As opposed to other artists, there is no one way in which she paints…She's consistently redefining, reinventing, trying things,” he said. “ She is a master, in the classical sense: she makes masterpieces."

Dumas was an important artist long before her work broke records at auctions, however. In her work, we can see the necessity of understanding and accurately reflecting the role of women artists throughout history, as well as giving them the space they deserve to thrive today. Here’s to only more record-breaking work from female artists in the future.