On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the achievements of women across all fields, and the art world offers powerful examples of creativity, resilience, and influence. For much of history, women artists were overlooked or overshadowed by their male counterparts. Today, however, the market and institutions are increasingly recognizing their impact. A recent milestone illustrates this shift: a painting by Frida Kahlo sold for a record-breaking $54.7 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a woman ever sold at auction. From pioneers of modernism to contemporary voices reshaping visual culture, the artists on this list represent some of the most influential women in the modern art world.
10. Lee Krasner
Auction record: $11.6 million, for The Eye is the First Circle (1960)
Lee Krasner’s The Eye is the First Circle (1960) sold for $11,6 million at Sotheby’s in May 2019, making it the 10th most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction.
Despite being referred to as Jackson Pollock’s wife for most of her life, it has to be noted that when they met in New York in 1942(?) Krasner was considered to be a more successful and established artist. During the 3 decades after her husband's death Krasner created a substantial body of work, although her paintings found popularity and demand relatively recently.
9. Jenny Saville
Auction record: $12.4 million, for Propped (1992)
You might remember Banksy’s legendary self-destructing artwork, Jenny Saville’s Popped sold the same week in London in 2018 which rendered Saville the most expensive living female artist at the time.
Saville spent most of her artistic life exploring human skin and flesh, depicting it with vividness and raw quality rarely seen elsewhere. Propped (1992) was the centerpiece of Saville’s graduation, displayed opposite a mirror in which the text overlayed on top of the human figure could be read - “If we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” The quote belongs to Belgian-born feminist writer Luce Irigaray
The record price at auction was paid by Russian investor Alex Greenberg.
8. Marlene Dumas
Auction record: $13.6 million, for Miss January (1997)
Dutch painter Marlene Dumas Miss January became one of the most expensive works by a female artist ever sold at auction when it sold with Christie’s last May. That result fell on the lower end of its estimate, but doubled Dumas’s previous record, set when Sotheby’s sold The Visitor (1995) for $6.33 million in 2008.
The 3 meter tall Miss January, stands out as provocative goddess embodying the artist’s painterly versatility and a stark example of her direct inspiration, women of the worlds of pageantry and adult industry, those who get objectified the most.
7. Agnes Martin
Auction record: $18.7 million, for Grey Stone II (1961)
New York’s November 2023 auctions coincided with the first winds of a market slump. Nevertheless, this early iteration of Martin’s minimalist grids soared to more than double its high estimate. Untitled #44 (1974) had set Martin’s existing record when it sold for $17.7 million the previous fall.
Grey Stone II is the only one of Martin’s three large-scale works in gold leaf to land in private hands. In fact, Martin only made 60 grids total. They are quite rare to come by.
Agnes Martin’s work feels light as a wind, reminding viewers of nature - forest, water, sky, although they are highly abstract, as if only a visual representation of the sensations invoked by experiencing the nature.
6. Tamara de Lempicka
Auction record: $21.1 million, for Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932)
This prime Lempicka illuminated London’s auction week in February 2020, selling with Christie’s for $17 million more than the last time it surfaced, in 2009. Not a surprising result considering her market had spiked three months before this work went to auction, when La Tunique Rose (1927) sold for $13.36 million with Sotheby’s.
Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932). Sold for £16,280,000 at Christie’s London on January 5, 2020. Image courtesy Christie’s.
Lempicka was probably one of the most interesting figures of the art world of the early 20th century, a woman who had seen it all. One of her most iconic works, interestingly enough painted after the stock market crash of 1929 is her self portrait in which she is driving a green Bugatti. Her works are owned by many celebrities including Madonna and Barbara Streisand.
5. Leonora Carrington
Auction record: $28.4 million, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945)
Dagobert sold at Sotheby’s in May of 2025 after 10 minutes of frenzied bidding for impressive $28,4 million. Carrington traveled through Europe, dated Surrealist Max Ernst in Paris and escaped a mental institution before landing in Mexico City at 28 in 1945, that’s when she created Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945).
Many mistakenly attribute Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert to Hieronymus Bosch, the early renaissance Dutch painter, not surprising considering the Carrington was heavily inspired by the medieval and early renaissance art. Although her work id undoubtedly modern and surrealist the mythical, mystical
4. Joan Mitchell
Auction record: $29.1 million, for Untitled (1959)
This monumental, jewel-toned tangle became art history’s highest-selling abstraction by a woman when it sold in November 2023.
Christie’s called Untitled “a best-in-class example” of Mitchell’s oeuvre, Untitled hails from the peak of Mitchell’s painterly power. She made it the year she left New York for Paris.
Joan Mitchell’s retrospective was title natural expressionism, in her words: “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me, remembered feeling of them, which of course become transformed, I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leave me with.”
3. Louise Bourgeois
Auction record: $32.8 million, for Spider (1996)
This early iteration of Bourgeois’s signature spider sculptures, which famously call to mind the many facets of maternal love, sold for $32,8 Sotheby’s in May 2023. Now this 10-foot tall bronze, the first in an edition of six, is the most expensive sculpture by a woman artist to date.
2. Georgia O’Keeffe
Auction record: $44.4 million, for Jimson weed/White flower no. 1 (1932)
El sueńo unseated this painting, which had been the most expensive work by a woman artist since it sold at Sotheby’s in November 2014 after a seven-person bidding war that quadrupled its estimate. Adjusted for inflation, her record amounts to $61 million—arguably, O’Keeffe’s still on top.
Regardless, Jimson Weed proves a prime example of the American painter’s iconic flowers. Originally owned by O’Keeffe’s younger sister, the painting spent six years in George W. Bush’s White House dining room. O’keeffe was considered to be the American Symbol of modernity being know for paintings New York’s famous skyscrapers, but she found her love for nature after leaving New York and interestingly enough, her most expensive art depicts a flower called Datura stramonium also known as Devil’s trumpet, a highly toxic flower that has been used as poison for centuries.
- Frida Kahlo
Auction record: $54.6 million, for El sueño (La cama) (1940)
This dreamy self-portrait by the Mexican painter sold at Sotheby’s this past fall for $54,6, breaking the record for the most expensive art by a female artist ever sold at auction. Kahlo crowns this list, its only woman of color.
El sueño epitomizes the artist’s calling cards, from her Surrealist undertones to her recurring depictions of beds. It’s also one of the few examples to evade Mexico’s strict export laws on Kahlo’s work, courtesy of consignor Selma Ertegun. The work’s rife with symbolism, and charged by crisis. Kahlo’s health was failing, her lover Leon Trotsky had just been killed, and she was reconciling with Diego Rivera when she made it.
