Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Most Expensive Woman



Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was still creating new work in the week before she died at age 98. Or so it was reported. And I easily believed it to be true, considering the sustained urgency of purpose over a long lifetime.



In 2011 one of her giant Spider sculptures sold for $10.7 million, a new record price for the artist and the highest price ever paid for a work by a woman artist. (That last fact, though, requires in fairness to be set against another record-setting sale of 2011, when the Royal Family of Qatar bought Cézanne's Card Players of 1892/93 for $259 million, a new record price for a single work of art of any kind. That is how remote the highest female artist's price is from the highest male artist's price.)

Defiance, 1991


Partial Recall, 1979


Nature Study, 1984-2002


Hand, 2001


Untitled, 1996


Couple, 2007


1937


1946




2003