Why Old Women Have Replaced Young Men as the Art World’s Darlings

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Alex Logsdail, international director of Lisson Gallery, remembers the first time his father encountered Carmen Herrera’s work. It was 2008, and the painter Tony Bechara had brought some of her canvases to London for the Pinta art fair. None of them sold, says Logsdail, but his father, Lisson Gallery founder Nicholas Logsdail, was smitten.

“We said, ‘Just leave them here,’” says Logsdail, referring to the unsold paintings. “It sort of seemed blindingly obvious that it needed to be shown, and it was filling a gap in history.”

Demand for older, female artists like Herrera, who was famously 89 when she sold her first artwork and is now a ripe 102, has risen sharply in recent years, the result of a perfect art-world storm. As institutions attempt to revise the art-historical canon, passionate dealers and curators see years of promotion come to fruition, and blue-chip galleries search for new artists to represent among those initially overlooked, prices and institutional recognition for artists such as Carol Rama, Irma Blank, Geta Brătescu, and Herrera have soared.

“She wasn’t discovered”

To be sure, many of these artists have long been known to art-world insiders. Fergus McCaffrey, founder and president of his eponymous gallery, has been collecting Rama’s work since first seeing it at an art fair in Berlin more than a decade ago. He’s since amassed well over two dozen works. Manuela Wirth, co-founder with her husband Iwan of Hauser & Wirth, has long collected Romanian artist Brătescu, although the gallery only began representing her in April. Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski and her husband, the architect Thomas Krahenbuhl, have followed Blank’s work for years, watching sadly as her prices keep moving further out of their reach. Isabella Bortolozzi notes that Rama was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2003.  

“They’ve always been visible and exhibiting, but most of them had careers that weren’t at the center of the art world,” says Mary Sabbatino, vice president at Galerie Lelong, which began representing the Paris-based, Lebanese-born artist Etel Adnan in 2014. Adnan, for example, had long been represented by Beirut- and Hamburg-based Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

“When she was picked for Documenta [in 2012], everyone suddenly ‘discovered’ her,” says Sabbatino. “But she wasn’t discovered; the venue finally matched her achievements.”

Consider the trajectory of Rama. Despite her recognition at the Venice Biennale, she was little-known in the U.S., and died penniless in 2015, according to McCaffrey. Ten years ago, Isabella Bortolozzi, who had met her in the 1990s through a mutual friend and art collector, put on a solo show of Rama’s work at her gallery in Berlin, with the eventual aim of realizing a major retrospective; a show of over 200 works spanning seven decades was finally mounted in 2014 at MACBA Barcelona, and subsequently traveled to Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, EMMA Museum in Finland, IMMA in Dublin, and GAM Torino in Rama’s hometown.

“This retrospective raised awareness of Carol’s work internationally,” says Bortolozzi, leading to the current New Museum show, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, that she and New York- and London-based gallery Lévy Gorvy helped produce. Dominique Lévy had joined Bortolozzi in representing the Archivo Carol Rama in September 2016 before being joined by former Christie’s head of post-war and contemporary art to form Lévy Gorvy in December.

Seeing the retrospective in Paris convinced McCaffrey, the longtime collector and gallerist, that he needed to bring her work to the U.S. market. He mounted a show of nearly 50 works from between 1938 and 1945 in September 2016.

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