Women painters take center stage at NY art auctions

With a new record expected for a work by Lee Krasner and another one possible for a Helen Frankenthaler, the appetite for female abstract painters, and women artists in general, is growing fast as New York gears up for its spring auctions beginning on Monday. “We’ve seen an extraordinary recalibration in the market for female artists, both historical and contemporary,” said David Galperin, head of evening sales at Sotheby’s auction house. Last year was already an auspicious one, with record-breaking auctions for the late Frankenthaler, as well as for 50-year-old Briton Cecily Brown, Grace Hartigan, who died in 2008, and above all Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992 and whose “Blueberry” went in May 2018 for $16.6 million. David Leiber, a partner at the David Zwirner gallery, which has exhibited a number of Mitchell’s works, recalled that although she found popular and critical acclaim very early on, only recently did her work profit from the increasing interest in women artists. “These