Older female artists are suddenly getting the spotlight. Should we be cynical?

We live in a world that fetishises youth to an extreme degree. We’re obsessed with anti-ageing potions, or if we’re feeling progressive, ‘ageing gracefully.’ Artists, like the rest of us, are expected to market themselves via their hotness, youth and vitality. It’s a culture that permanently seeks the breakout star, usually conceived as a runaway success rocketing to glory in their first year out of art school promising a lifetime of work that will only appreciate in value. 

But in the face of a drooping economy, young artists are feeling the pain of a boom-and-bust cycle of value. The New York Times reports that sales of work by young artists declined by 39% in the first half of 2024. In its place, we are seeing a steady rise in interest in older artists, notably women. Of course, there’s always been an appetite for the treasured elder statesmen who are household names: your David Hockneys, your Gerhard Richters. But there has been a notable increase in active female artists reaching international recognition for the first time in their eighties and nineties. Given the intersection of sexism and ageism that makes ageing as a woman a particularly toxic cocktail, it’s paradoxical that these artists are hitting the big leagues at a moment in their lives when we might expect them to be treated as irrelevant. What can they tell us about the way ageing and femininity are entwined in the art world?

Thaddeus Ropac added two older women to his gallery’s roster in the past few years: Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth (born 1940), who just this summer, had a solo show in Venice and a retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, after spending most of her career only exhibiting in Austria; and American painter Joan Snyder (born 1940). “It’s hard to talk about the old age thing,” Snyder told me when I asked her about how she felt about getting older. “All the stuff you read about, it’s all true.” She says she’s too close to the lived experience to really be able to tell me about how she’s experienced prejudice, or special treatment, because of her age. “I’ve experienced the woman thing, the feminist thing, being labelled in certain ways because of that,” she says. But age? “Galleries want older women artists because they want to get their estates,” Snyder told me with a bit of a smirk. But she also says she’s making the best work she’s ever made, at the age of 85, so she feels absolutely ready for her first show at Thaddaeus Ropac’s London gallery in November. Is she getting this new international platform now because her work is at its peak, or is it because she’s reached a certain age? “No one can possibly give the answer as to why something did or didn’t happen,” she reminds me, at least not in the subjective, fickle and opaque world of art.

There are many other artists who follow this pattern. Rose Wylie was born in 1934 and has been painting since the 1950s, but only began to gain international attention in the mid-2000s. She was picked up by David Zwirner in 2017 and is something of a poster child for the ‘old-lady’ trend. Another artist, Lois Dodd (born 1927), was largely ignored by the art world until the 2010s, when collector Robert Gober donated her painting, View through Elliot’s Shack Looking South (1971), to MoMA, spurring renewed interest in her quiet, observational paintings of windows and landscapes. Dodd has since had a retrospective and seen the price of her works shoot up, and is still, at the age of 95, working steadily on the coast of Maine. Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) had a breakout year in 2022 at the age of 74 with a Guggenheim retrospective in New York and the Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, after her potent installations had long been ignored for being too political and difficult to categorise. 

Vicuña said in a 2022 Wallpaper* interview that she was not bitter or angry about the long wait for attention. “What happened to me is the reason I was able to continue doing what I was doing; I found souls – people – that believed in what I did.” She wasn’t waiting for the praise of the establishment. As Dodd told the New York Times in 2023, she also wasn’t expecting fame, but now that it’s finally come, she’s glad: “It’s very nice to be paid attention to in this way. Things add up after a while.” Wylie is glad her work is finding new audiences, too, also telling the New York Times that her favourite thing is when her paintings reach more people: “What I absolutely very much like is for them to get into museums where everybody can see them. That’s my ideal.”

Each one of these artists is (finally) getting the attention that, in my opinion, she deserves, but I’m cynical about the trend, too: Is it a long overdue reappraisal, or more pessimistically, a purely commercial desire for a large back catalogue of underappreciated, undervalued work to sell, and, eventually, an artist’s estate? And how do we resolve the paradox of the interplay between age and gender.

“Maybe because of her age or the fact she was not part of a scene, her route and ambition have been very pure,” Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal, an associate director at Zwirner said on the occasion of Rose Wylie joining the gallery roster in 2017. That ‘purity,’ which feels very gendered indeed, is at the heart of the appeal of older women for collectors. People want to buy the next big thing: an ‘undiscovered’ woman in her eighties can be as new and shiny as a young artist, but can be a safer bet as she brings with her a lifetime of work, unlike someone just starting out. As art consultant Marta Gnyp notes, an older woman artist can offer clear connections to the big-ticket art movements of the 20th century, for a fraction of the price and none of the macho drama that raises eyebrows today, because she was working in the ’60s and ‘70s alongside your Rothkos and Pollocks but wasn’t really part of the scene. Buying her work is a good deal, and one you can feel good about. We all know that the art world is sexist, and that art history has been dominated by white men – it’s not news that galleries are trying to be seen as progressive and inclusive by adding more women to their stables. But the age factor is more complex than just the usual narrative of adding women to the canon. The delights and horrors of ageing as a woman are becoming more talked about; not just the physical changes, but the social shift from being a sexualised object or a potential mother to being a sort of liminal person, rejected by young people and by male peers. The intersection of age and gender means that women’s experience of getting old is vastly different from men’s. Psychologists have found that women are reluctant to even call themselves old or elderly because of the associations with fragility, irrelevance and isolation. Many of the artists I mention in this piece didn’t want to be interviewed, probably because I pitched it to them as a story about old age.

From where I’m sitting, the rise in interest in older women artists is a two-sided coin: the intergenerational exchange that results from work by women in the last quarter of their lives being included on gallery walls is remarkable and represents a rebuttal to the anti-ageing rhetoric we are drowning in. But it’s undeniably frustrating that they had to wait this long for acclaim, and that the renewed demand for their work can feel uncritical and greedy. Older women artists are now a good investment, which is the result of decades of feminist intervention and collectors finally catching up. The conundrum of the art world that sees commodification following critical acclaim is inescapable and impossible to resolve. It’s great that people want to buy this work, but it’s important to recognise the structures that have led to its sudden reevaluation, and their roots in many of the same sexist attitudes that kept these artists out of the public eye for so long. “We broke down a lot of barriers in the 70s, we really did, but things didn’t change as much as we wanted them to,” Snyder tells me. “But compared to what it was, it’s better now.”