Marlene Dumas set a new auction record for the most expensive living female artist when her 1997 painting *Miss January* sold for $13.6 million at a Christie’s evening sale. The work, featuring a nude woman with a ghostly white face, was pre-sold with a third-party guarantee. Other women artists also broke personal records that night, including Simone Leigh (sculpture for $5.7 million) and Emma McIntyre (painting for $201,000). However, the top five priciest works of the week were all by men: Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, and Piet Mondrian, with Mondrian’s *Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue* selling for $47.6 million.
The record highlights persistent gender disparities in the art market. While Dumas’s achievement is a milestone, her painting is worth less than half of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s $23.4 million *Baby Boom* and far below the records of living male artists like Ed Ruscha ($68.3 million) and Christopher Wool ($29.9 million). The article argues that despite institutional accolades—Dumas has had a MoMA retrospective and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale—women artists continue to be undervalued at auction, underscoring that the market still has significant progress to make toward equity.