[[[pull_quote]]]

In her 2001 memoir, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, DorotheaTanning recounts her first meeting with her future husband, the greatSurrealist Max Ernst. It was 1942 and he was scouting for the survey show“Thirty-one Women” when he arrived at her apartment for a brief studiovisit, stayed for a lengthy chess game and, a week later, moved in.

“That we were both painters did not strike me as anything but thehappiest of coincidences,” Tanning writes. That, however, was beforetheir relationship was exposed to the art world, where, to her dismay,she often found herself pigeonholed as merely “his wife.” As she notedof the Surrealists, “the place of women among these iconoclasts was notdifferent from what it was among the population in general, includingthe bourgeoisie.”

Certainly, it is no secret that throughout history, the art world hasbeen a tough place for women—whether they’re up against the sexuallycharged politics of the Surrealists, the purported egalitarianism of theBauhaus or the machismo of the Abstract Expressionists. And when thewoman in question is married to another artist—especially a renownedone, like Ernst—the problems can be compounded.

Ask market specialists, and they’ll probably tell you that generalizations are impossible.Apart from the individual dynamics of each union, the respective acclaim of husbandand wife also depends on how well developed their careers were before marriage; whichspouse outlives the other; and who is the most prolific, works in the more popular mediumsor has the most recognizable style.

But ask an art historian, and you’ll likely get a different answer. “I don’t thinkit’s so much the relationship that adds a damper as it is society,” says Maura Reilly, thecurator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.“The art market is a microcosm of society, which is extraordinarily sexist. Whether or notthe men and women within those relationships consider themselves equal, their prices arealways unequal, because society maintains that inequality.” The record concurs.

Take Sonia and Robert Delaunay, both proponents of Orphism, a sensuous and colorfuloffshoot of Cubism. Although they collaborated, she devoted a great share of her lateryears to promoting his work. Sonia outlived Robert by decades and is generally acknowledgedas the better artist, but his pieces have frequently exceeded the million-dollar markat auction, while hers have done so only once, in 2002, when her Marché au Minho of 1915,a vividly hued abstraction of a Portuguese market scene, achieved $3,878,902.

Then there’s Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who, with her husband, Jean Arp, was at the centerof Swiss Dada until her accidental death at 53, in 1943, from carbon-monoxide poisoning.Today her work is considerably less known than his. It’s also less costly: At auction, herrecord stands at $1,411,764—about half of Arp’s $2,673,796 top price.

Although Lee Krasner outlived her husband, Jackson Pollock, by 28 years, her auctionhigh is only about a quarter of his. Ditto for the 79-year-old Helen Frankenthaler, whosecareer always seemed roughly on par with that of Robert Motherwell, both before and aftertheir 10-year-plus marriage. As for Tanning, now 98, who has studiously tried to avoid beingidentified as a “woman artist” or even a Surrealist, her auction prices top out at $70,237,achieved in 1990 for The Philosophers, a shadowy scene from 1952 in which two figures appearto tussle over a drink in a bar. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with the $2,429,500record commanded by Ernst, whose work, experts generally agree, is undervalued.

“Historically, women have been somewhat underappreciated,” acknowledges RobertManley, the head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s New York. Yet in recentyears, he adds, the market for many women—especially Krasner, Frankenthaler and JoanMitchellhas dramatically improved. One might logically assume the upsurge has somethingto do with several decades of feminist scholarship and activism prompting a reassessmentby curators and critics. Not so. “It’s just a sign of the overall art market,” he says. “People arelooking to overlooked artists, period. I guess looking at women is a natural start.”

The Abstract Expressionist wives seem to have had it worse than many. Although themarket was not really a factor in those days (Manley notes that in theearly ’50s “nobody was buying anything by anyone, man or woman”),the movement itself was legendarily unfriendly to women. Elaine deKooning, Mercedes Matter and Krasner might have been asked to jointhe Eighth Street Club, an influential Ab-Ex discussion group foundedin 1949, but they weren’t included in board meetings. The Sidney JanisGallery threw some of them a bone that year by mounting the show“Artist: Man and Wife.” Then there’s the famous comment Krasner’steacher, Hans Hofmann, once made about one of her paintings: “Thisis so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.”

For Krasner especially, “the market has shown that there was anill effect from being married to someone who was such a proponent ofthat field,” says Anthony Grant, a senior international contemporary-artspecialist at Sotheby’s. She seems to have spent much of her marriageintroducing Pollock to influential people, keeping him sober and generally putting his needsbefore her own. In East Hampton, he painted in an expansive barn, while she worked ina bedroom. “In 1950s America, she was still expected to play the traditional role of wife,”says Reilly. “If we didn’t have Lee Krasner, we wouldn’t have Jackson Pollock. She kept himalive—she was his rock.”

After her husband’s death, in 1956, Krasner moved into his studio and eventuallyarrived at the exuberant abstractions that she’s known for today. Still, for decades, she didn’thave a major retrospective in the United States. Why? “I’d have to say principally because Iam Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” she commented in a 1972 interview. She finally got one, in 1983,the year before her death; it was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and latertraveled to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Life seems to have been better for women active in more communal movements, suchas the Bauhaus. The relationship between the weaver Anni Albers and her husband, Josef,began on somewhat unequal footing: She was a student at the Bauhaus; he was her mentor.He was working-class Catholic; she came from a prominent Jewish family in Berlin. Yet they were “two soul mates from the start,” says Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive directorof the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. Their work also had much in common: Both wereessentially geometric abstractionists who experimented endlessly—she with materialsand structure, he with color and light.

In addition, each had relationships that were beneficial to the other. Philip Johnson,who helped get them to America in 1933, after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, was primarilyAnni’s acquaintance and preferred her work to Josef’s. In 1949 he gave Anni a soloretrospective at MoMA that “at the time was a more major museum exhibition than anyJosef had had,” Fox Weber says. By the same token, he notes, “when museum directors orworld-famous photographers would walk into the house to see Josef, they would see Anni.There were collectors who would go to see work by one and then buy work by the other.The Hirshhorns [ Josef and Olga, who later founded the Hirshhorn Museum and SculptureGarden in Washington, D.C.] collected her because of him.” Yet today, in large part becauseAnni worked in textiles—one of the few disciplines open to women at the Bauhaus after1920—her art is far less known than Josef’s and commands a fraction of the price.

Certainly, marriage to an older, more renowned artistoffers some advantages. For Tanning, it provided an entréeinto “the ongoing Surrealist adventure,” as she put it. Likewise,Frida Kahlos 1929 union with Diego Rivera, a star of MexicanMuralism, immediately “catapulted her into a very internationalcosmopolitan life,” says Carmen Melián, the directorof the Latin American art department at Sotheby’s, which hasachieved most of Kahlo’s recent records.

Kahlo, a great character and wit who was fluent in fourlanguages, soon developed a cult following for her introspective,retablo-like paintings. She also threw fabulous partiesand managed Rivera’s business dealings and accounts. “Sheran his life so that he could go out and create, and he openedher to the intellectual jet set of the world,” says Melián.

Yet after her death in 1954, Kahlo’s work fell into obscurityuntil Hayden Herreras 1983 biography Frida helpedtransform her cultural reputation. (The 2002 movie basedon Herrera’s book and starring Salma Hayek brought Kahlo even broader popular recognition.)By the 1990s, her work was reaching the million-dollar range at auction. In May 1995,in Sotheby’s IBM Collection sale, Kahlo overtook her husband’s auction record when her1942 self-portrait, Autorretrato con chango y loro (“Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot”),sold for $3,192,500. She continued to break barriers. Five years later, her 1929 self-portraitin folkloric Tehuana attire achieved $5,065,750, which for a time made her the highest-pricedfemale artist, as well as Latin American artist, at auction. And in May 2006, a 1943self-portrait, Roots, depicting her floating above a barren landscape with lush green vinesgrowing from her body, sold for $5,616,000—setting another Latin American record thatremained until May 2008.

Melián says these prices are due in part to the fact that the workis rare (Kahlo’s total output was around 100 to 150 pictures). but shealso believes that the artist’s works sell because “people can relate to herself-examination—i think it speaks to the 20th and 21st centuries.” Kahlo’s great grief in life was her inability to bear children—although they can sometimes impede a career. Anthony Caros wife,the painter Sheila Girling, has said that she stopped working in the1950s while she raised their children. That’s the story for many. Yetmotherhood didn’t hold back the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. in 1934she was living amid the avant-garde of Hampstead, London, with herfuture husband, the abstract painter Ben Nicholson, when she gave birthto triplets. A month later, she returned to the studio.

“Despite being a young mother, she was extremely keen to pursueher work,” says Philip Harley, a British pictures specialist at Christie’s London. “Consequently, a lot of criticism has come her way for being toofocused on her career.” The births provoked a great change in Hepworth’ssculpture, leading to her use of triple elements and groupings and eventuallyresulting in the monumental pierced forms for which she is now known. Hepworth also suffered from the mistaken assumption that she was a younger follower ofthe sculptor Henry Moore. They were, in fact, classmates at the Royal College of Art.

Today it seems vastly more possible for art world couples to share power. In manycases, the wife’s career outshines the husband’s (see “Ladies First”). Yet the issueremains loaded. Of the many artists contacted for this story, either directly or through theirdealers—including Frankenthaler, Helen Marden, Nancy Rubins, Lisa Yuskavage and thesculptor Sophia Vari, long married to Fernando Botero—most either did not respond ordeclined to be interviewed. One of the only artists willing to speak on the record was thepainter April Gornik, who married another painter, Eric Fischl, in 1998. They have a “figure-groundrelationship,” she likes to joke, because while she is known for emotive, luminouslandscapes, he paints highly charged figurative scenes.

Their relationship has been going strong since they met at the Nova Scotia Collegeof Art and Design in Halifax in 1975. He was on the faculty and she was a student, but theymoved to New York together and their careers took off roughly in tandem in the 1980s, asrepresentational painting resurged. Today the 55-year-old Gornik shows with New York’s Danese Gallery, while her husband has been represented for years by Mary Boone.

Since the beginning, Gornik says, each has been a great influence on the other. Still, shelaughs, “it’s always been competitive. No matter how much success we’ve had and attentionwe’ve gotten, we’re both the sort of people who feel insecure and easily flustered by lack ofattention. I can still get very jealous of him, and he of me.”

What about prices? After all, her record at auction is $29,900, while Fischl’s is$1.92 million. In the primary market, according to dealer Renato Danese, her large-scale paintings sell for $150,000to $175,000 while his can command upwards of $500,000. “I rarely think of that,” Gorniksays. “Pricing art is such a peculiar activity. It’s just too weird a thing to figure out.”

"[Husbands and] Wives" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.