50 Most Influential Female Artists

In November 2025 a small oil painting of a woman asleep on a four-poster bed, with a skeleton wired to the canopy above her, sold at Sotheby’s New York for $54.7 million. El sueño (La cama) was painted by Frida Kahlo in 1940, and its sale made her the most expensive woman artist in auction history.

The record it broke had stood for eleven years: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1, $44.4 million in 2014. Both figures are remarkable. Both are also a rounding error against Leonardo’s $450.3 million, and that gap is the real subject of any honest list of influential women artists.

What follows is fifty of them, from a Renaissance court painter to artists working today. Not a ranking — influence does not sort into an order — but a working reference, with dates, what each is actually known for, and where the market has placed them.

The Ten Highest Auction Results for Women Artists

The Gap, in Numbers

It is worth setting the celebration against the arithmetic. Of the 500 most expensive works sold at auction in 2022, fifty were by women. Of the top hundred, two. Of the top fifty, none at all.

The fifty most expensive works by women sold that year came to $332.4 million between them — less than the combined price of two paintings by men in the same season. Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn alone made $195 million, more than seven times the top result by any woman that year.

The direction of travel is real: nine of the ten highest results for women artists have been set since 2018, and the pace is accelerating. The distance still to travel is also real.

Before 1800: The Ones Who Got In Anyway

Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532–1625) — the first woman artist to achieve international reputation in her lifetime. Court painter to Philip II of Spain, and a portraitist whose sitters look caught mid-thought rather than posed. Michelangelo corresponded with her.

Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) — generally regarded as the first woman to run a professional studio and support a family by painting. She produced large public altarpieces at a time when women were barred from the life drawing that such commissions required.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) — the most consequential woman painter of the Baroque. Judith Slaying Holofernes is the work everyone knows, and its physical brutality — the effort visible in the arms — is what separates it from every male version of the subject.

Clara Peeters (active 1607–1621) — a pioneer of still life in the Netherlands, who painted her own reflection into the pewter and glassware. Almost nothing is known of her life, which is itself the point.

Judith Leyster (1609–1660) — a master of the Haarlem guild whose work was attributed to Frans Hals for two centuries until a forged signature was discovered in 1893.

Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) — the most successful still-life painter of the Dutch Golden Age, male or female, with a career spanning six decades and prices to match.

Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) — a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. No woman was admitted again until 1936.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) — Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, who fled the Revolution and rebuilt a career across four countries. She painted more than 600 portraits.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803) — Vigée Le Brun’s rival, and the one who campaigned successfully to lift the Académie’s cap of four women members.

The Nineteenth Century

Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) — the most famous woman painter of her century. She held a police permit to wear trousers so she could work in slaughterhouses and livestock markets, and The Horse Fair made her internationally rich.

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) — a founding Impressionist who exhibited in seven of the eight group shows, more than Monet. Her domestic interiors are not a lesser subject; they are the only subject she was permitted to observe closely.

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) — the American Impressionist who brought the movement to the United States by advising the collectors who bought it. Auction record $7.5 million.

Camille Claudel (1864–1943) — a sculptor of ferocious ability whose reputation was absorbed into Rodin’s for most of a century. She spent her last thirty years institutionalised.

Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) — an artists’ model who taught herself to paint by watching, then became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Her nudes look at the viewer.

Modernism

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) — painted the first entirely abstract works in Western art in 1906, years before Kandinsky, then stipulated that they not be shown until twenty years after her death. Art history is still absorbing her.

Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) — Russian avant-gardist, founding member of the Jack of Diamonds group, and briefly the most expensive woman artist in the world when Picking Apples made $9.8 million in 2007.

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) — co-founder of Orphism, who took abstraction into textiles, fashion and car design decades before anyone called that a practice.

Hannah Höch (1889–1978) — the only woman in the Berlin Dada group and the one who did most to invent photomontage as a critical medium.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) — the definitive Art Deco portraitist, whose lacquered figures have proved unusually durable at auction.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) — the most significant American modernist of her generation, and the one who spent sixty years correcting people about what her flowers meant. Held the auction record for a woman artist from 2014 to 2025.

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) — now the most expensive woman artist in auction history at $54.7 million, and the only woman of colour at the top of that list. Fifty-five of her roughly 143 paintings are self-portraits.

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) — British-born Surrealist who spent most of her life in Mexico, painting a private mythology that the market took eighty years to catch up with. Auction record $3.3 million in 2022.

Remedios Varo (1908–1963) — Carrington’s close friend and fellow exile, whose alchemical interiors are among the most technically precise paintings of the Surrealist movement.

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) — a Surrealist who kept working for seventy years and produced some of her strongest work after eighty.

Irma Stern (1894–1966) — South Africa’s foremost modernist, who brought Expressionism to the continent and holds several of the highest auction results for African art.

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) — the sculptor who pierced the solid form, opening a hole through stone in 1931 and changing what sculpture could be. Auction record $8.6 million.

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) — built monumental assemblages from found wood, painted uniformly black, that read as architecture and altarpiece at once.

Postwar and the Abstract Expressionists

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) — a first-generation Abstract Expressionist whose reputation was suppressed by her marriage to Pollock and recovered decisively after her death. Auction record $11.6 million for The Eye is the First Circle.

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) — arguably the greatest painter of the second Abstract Expressionist generation. Her works appear more often in the top results for women artists than any other name. Record $29.1 million.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) — invented the soak-stain technique in 1952 and gave Colour Field painting its method.

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) — painted grids and stripes for forty years with a discipline that reads as devotional. Consistently among the highest-priced women at auction.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) — the most influential sculptor on this list. Her Spider holds the record for a sculpture by a woman at $32.8 million, and her first major retrospective — MoMA, 1982 — was that museum’s first for any woman.

Eva Hesse (1936–1970) — died at thirty-four having reshaped sculpture around latex, fibreglass and impermanence.

Bridget Riley (b. 1931) — the defining figure of Op Art, still working, and still refusing the decorative reading of her work.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) — the most visited artist in the world by some measures. Has lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric institution since 1977 and works daily in a studio opposite.

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) — the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney, at seventy-two. Her mosaic-like abstractions now hang in the White House.

Faith Ringgold (1930–2024) — took quilting, a form dismissed as craft, and made it carry American history painting.

Betye Saar (b. 1926) — assemblage artist whose The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) is among the most consequential works of American political art.

Photography, Performance and Conceptual Practice

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) — documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined how a country remembers a decade.

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) — changed portrait photography by refusing the distance between photographer and subject.

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) — the Untitled Film Stills made identity itself the medium, and remain among the most cited photographs of the twentieth century.

Marina Abramović (b. 1946) — the artist who established endurance and presence as material. In 2023 she became the first woman to take the Royal Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history.

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) — put advertising’s own grammar to work against it, in Futura Bold on red.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) — took text out of the gallery and onto LED, benches and building facades.

Judy Chicago (b. 1939) — The Dinner Party (1979) remains the most ambitious work of feminist art ever made, and took five years and hundreds of collaborators.

Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) — the first woman to win the Turner Prize, in 1993, for casting the inside of a house.

Tracey Emin (b. 1963) — whatever one makes of the work, My Bed permanently altered what British audiences expected art to admit.

Contemporary African and Diaspora Artists

This is the section most lists of fifty influential women artists leave out, and it contains some of the most consequential practices working now.

Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Ethiopia) — her layered architectural abstractions made $10.7 million in November 2023, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an African-born artist of any gender, and place her second among living women artists.

Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972, Kenya) — hybrid figures fusing woman, animal and water spirit. Given unusual prominence at the 2026 Venice Biennale with a five-metre bronze at the Arsenale harbour and an entire room in the Central Pavilion.

Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Nigeria) — works on land, extraction and value across drawing, installation and performance. Her 2026 Venice commission clads the Central Pavilion columns in brick and living plants that grow over them across the run.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Nigeria) — layered domestic interiors combining painting, drawing and transfer printing. Auction record $4.7 million in 2022.

Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, South Africa) — describes themselves as a visual activist. The ongoing Somnyama Ngonyama self-portraits are among the most widely exhibited photographic series of the past decade.

Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) — brought Ndebele wall painting into the contemporary canon. In 1991 she became the first African and first woman to paint a BMW Art Car, and she is still working in her nineties.

Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Egypt) — embroiders on canvas, using a medium coded as women’s work to carry imagery that is anything but decorative.

Billie Zangewa (b. 1973, Malawi) — hand-stitched silk collages of domestic life, made without a sewing machine.

Peju Alatise (b. 1975, Nigeria) — sculptor, architect and writer, and one of the defining voices of contemporary Nigerian art.

Nike Davies-Okundaye (b. 1951, Nigeria) — adịre textile artist who has trained thousands of women through her own art centres.

Sokari Douglas Camp (b. 1958, Nigeria) — steel sculptor working in London for four decades, and among the first African women to be collected internationally at scale.

Contemporary Painters and Sculptors

Jenny Saville (b. 1970) — the highest-priced living woman artist at auction, for monumental paintings of bodies that refuse every convention of how flesh should be depicted.

Kara Walker (b. 1969) — cut-paper silhouettes that use the politest medium in art history to depict the least polite subject in American history.

Amy Sherald (b. 1973) — painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait, and holds one of the highest median auction prices of any woman artist working.

Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) — rhinestone-encrusted portraits that reclaim the odalisque outright.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) — paints fictional people from imagination and memory, in a day, in a tradition that runs through Manet.

Cecily Brown (b. 1969) — the most convincing argument currently being made that gestural painting is not exhausted.

Christina Quarles (b. 1985) — entangled bodies that will not resolve into single figures. Auction record $4.5 million in 2022.

Avery Singer (b. 1987) — builds paintings from 3D-modelled scenes and airbrush, at the point where digital and painted images stop being distinguishable. Record $5.3 million in 2022.

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Iran) — photography and film on exile, gender and the Iranian revolution.

Do we count fifty? We count sixty-eight. The list was never going to hold at fifty, and that is the more useful finding.

Why the Gap Persists

Three mechanisms, none of them about ability.

Historical exclusion compounds. Women were barred from academies, from life drawing and therefore from the large commissions that built reputations. A body of work that was never made cannot be revalued later.

Attribution went the wrong way. Leyster’s paintings were sold as Hals for two hundred years. Claudel’s were absorbed into Rodin’s. When a work by a woman was good, the market’s instinct was to reassign it.

The secondary market rewards depth. Prices rise where there is a long record of prior sales, and that record only exists for artists who were being collected all along. Women are still building the trading history that men accumulated over a century.

What has changed is the rate. Nine of the top ten results for women artists are from the past eight years, museum acquisition policies have shifted materially, and the artists arriving now — Mehretu, Crosby, Quarles, Singer — are being collected seriously from the beginning of their careers rather than rediscovered at seventy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the most expensive female artist?

Frida Kahlo. El sueño (La cama) (1940) sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 2025, taking the record from Georgia O’Keeffe’s $44.4 million, set in 2014.

Who is the most famous female artist of all time?

By public recognition, Frida Kahlo. By influence on other artists, the stronger arguments are for Artemisia Gentileschi, Louise Bourgeois and Hilma af Klint, who painted the first abstract works in Western art in 1906.

Which African women artists should I know?

Julie Mehretu, who holds the auction record for any African-born artist, along with Wangechi Mutu, Otobong Nkanga, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zanele Muholi, Esther Mahlangu, Ghada Amer and Billie Zangewa.

Why are female artists worth less at auction?

Because historical exclusion produced fewer works, misattribution moved credit to men, and secondary-market prices depend on a long trading record that women were prevented from accumulating. Of the 500 most expensive works sold at auction in 2022, fifty were by women; of the top fifty, none.

Who was the first professional woman artist?

Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) is generally credited as the first woman to run a professional studio and support a family through painting.

Which living woman artist sells for the most?

Jenny Saville holds the auction record among living women artists, with Julie Mehretu second following her $10.7 million result in November 2023.

Are women better represented in museums now?

Better, but from a low base. Acquisition and exhibition policies have shifted significantly since 2015, though the permanent collections of most major museums remain overwhelmingly male because they were assembled over the preceding century.

Auction figures verified against published Sotheby’s and Christie’s results, September 2026. Further reading: 25 influential Black women artists, Wangechi Mutu at Venice 2026, Otobong Nkanga’s Central Pavilion commission, and how to verify provenance before buying.