The art world, as we know it — its great museums, its auction houses, its galleries, its patronage networks, its very idea of what collecting means — was not handed to us whole. It was built, piece by piece, by women whose names we sometimes know and sometimes have forgotten, but whose vision is present in every institution we walk through, every catalogue we open, every record price we read about on a Monday morning.
Founders of the Canon
Before there was a canon, there were women who decided what would be preserved, what would be celebrated, and what the public would be permitted to see. The story of modern institutional art history is, in no small measure, the story of extraordinary female patrons and founders who turned private vision into public legacy.
The impulse stretches back centuries. In the Florence of the sixteenth century, two Medici women — operating across different courts and different countries — together established a model of female patronage that would become the template for modern arts stewardship. Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, was instrumental in the family's consolidation of artworks that would eventually form the foundation of the Uffizi Gallery — today among the most visited museums on earth. Her role in shaping the early Medici collection is far less cited than her husband's, yet the civic ambition that transformed Florence into the cradle of the Renaissance was as much hers as his.
Her counterpart in this history is Catherine de' Medici — Cosimo's cousin, who became Queen of France and one of the most consequential patrons of her age. Catherine carried the Medici instinct for cultural power to the French court, assembling a collection of extraordinary depth and deploying art with deliberate political intelligence to legitimize and project dynastic authority. Her patronage laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the Louvre — transplanting the Florentine model of civic arts patronage onto French soil, where it took root and flourished for centuries. Together, Eleonora and Catherine established what has since become the foundational model for modern arts patronage: that collecting is not merely private pleasure, but public architecture — a principle that every great museum, foundation, and collection that followed has inherited.
"The history of art patronage is the history of women deciding what mattered — and then doing something about it."
— Tristan BultmanThree centuries later, that same impulse arrived in New York with a new set of names and a new sense of urgency.
In 1929, three women — Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller — founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA was not a conservative institution in search of legitimacy; it was a radical wager that modern art deserved a permanent, serious home in America. Abby Rockefeller, in particular, drove the project with tenacious purpose against considerable resistance, including from her own husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who found modern art baffling. She funded it, organized it, and gave it her collection. She is the reason MoMA exists.
Around the same time, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was building her own answer to the American art establishment. Frustrated that American artists could not find institutional homes for their work, she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931 — not as an abstract cultural gesture, but as a direct act of advocacy for living artists. Whitney had offered her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which declined. She built her own museum instead.
Then there was Peggy Guggenheim, the most disruptive patron of the twentieth century — a woman who collected art the way other people breathe: instinctively, urgently, sometimes chaotically, but always with a prescience that history has been slow to adequately credit. Her Art of This Century gallery in New York, which she ran from 1942 to 1947, was the launching pad for Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still all passed through its doors. Her Venice palazzo, now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, draws half a million visitors a year. She did not inherit a collection — she built one, in real time, at the precise moment when it mattered most.
The Women Who Made the Market
The commercial art market — that intricate ecosystem of dealers, advisors, auction specialists, and private networks — was equally shaped by women who built careers before the infrastructure existed to support them. The figures below represent only a handful of the many women who have served as foundational pillars of the art world; for every name here, there are dozens more whose contributions have been equally indispensable to the field we inhabit today.
Ran the most consequential gallery of the Abstract Expressionist era, giving first solo shows to Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Kline. She took artists seriously before the market had language for what they were doing.
Founded Marian Goodman Gallery in 1977 and spent four decades building a roster of the most important international artists of her generation, including Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, and William Kentridge.
A foundational force at Pace, one of the world's foremost galleries, whose program has shaped how blue-chip modern and contemporary art is defined, presented, and collected globally.
Transformed the advisory landscape at Christie's and later as co-founder of Art Agency, Partners — acquired by Sotheby's for a reported $85 million — establishing that rigorous advisory was a business unto itself.
The driving force behind some of the most significant auction results in European art market history, Newman brings an authoritative fluency across Impressionist, Modern, and Contemporary categories.
Ursula Hauser and Manuela Wirth co-founded what is now one of the world's largest and most respected galleries — built not on legacy but on vision, program, and relentless institutional seriousness.
What these women share is not only accomplishment but a particular kind of courage: operating in fields that were defined by male hierarchy, they built institutions on their own terms — and those institutions became the terms by which the field is now measured.
A Family's Thread
At Bultman Advisory, this history is not abstract. Our family's relationship with the art world — spanning now four generations — has been shaped at every turn by women who understood that collecting and patronage are acts of moral consequence, not merely aesthetic pleasure.
Muriel, Jeanne, and the Women Beside the Artists
Muriel Bultman Francis was among the first collectors to purchase a work by Jackson Pollock — doing so in direct support of the 1950 Betty Parsons Gallery show that introduced Pollock's drip paintings to serious collectors. That act of faith, at a moment when Pollock's work was still deeply contested, was not merely a purchase. It was a statement about who and what deserved to be taken seriously. Muriel's collection was later gifted to the New Orleans Museum of Art, where it remains a cornerstone of the permanent collection.
Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife and a formidable Abstract Expressionist in her own right — and a close friend to our family through Fritz Bultman's decades-long bond with the Cedar Tavern circle — navigated both the art world and the question of her own artistic identity with remarkable intelligence. She managed Pollock's estate after his death, worked tirelessly to protect and place his work, and ultimately established the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has since granted over $80 million to individual artists worldwide. She was, in every meaningful sense, both artist and architect.
Jeanne Bultman, wife of Fritz, helped organize the landmark modern art collection at Tougaloo College in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era — a project that used art, quite deliberately, as an instrument of dignity, aspiration, and cultural access at one of the South's most important historically Black colleges. In a moment when so much was at stake, the collection was understood not as decoration but as declaration.
These were not passive roles. These were acts of institutional will — decisions about what the world should look like and who should have access to it — made by women who understood that art is always, at some level, political.
The Market Today
The contemporary art market has undergone a seismic revaluation of female artists over the past fifteen years — one that is still accelerating. For much of the twentieth century, women artists were systematically underrepresented at auction, underpriced relative to male contemporaries of equivalent stature, and absent from the canonical surveys that determined which names entered the permanent collection.
That is changing, decisively and measurably.
for women's art (2022)
from 2012 to 2022
Christie's New York, 2021
The numbers tell part of the story. In 2012, total auction turnover for female artists stood at $350.6 million. By 2022, that figure had crossed $1 billion annually — a 194% increase that reflects not a speculative bubble but a structural correction, as the market begins to price female artists commensurate with their actual historical and critical standing.
Joan Mitchell, long considered secondary to the male AbEx painters she exhibited alongside, now commands prices commensurate with her actual stature. Louise Bourgeois achieved record after record in the years before and after her death. Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, and Lisa Yuskavage represent a generation of figurative painters whose market has moved from promising to generational. Julie Mehretu, Christina Quarles, and Toyin Ojih Odutola are among the most critically and commercially significant painters working today.
Eleonora di Toledo & Catherine de' Medici
Two Medici women shape the collections that become the Uffizi and inform the foundations of the Louvre — establishing the template for modern arts patronage.
MoMA Founded by Three Women
Bliss, Sullivan, and Rockefeller establish the museum that will define modern art for a century.
Peggy Guggenheim Opens Art of This Century
Abstract Expressionism finds its first institutional home — in a gallery run by a woman.
Muriel Bultman Francis Buys Pollock
Among the first collectors to support Pollock at Betty Parsons, alongside Lee Krasner's tireless advocacy for his work and legacy.
Jeanne Bultman & Tougaloo College
The modern art collection at Tougaloo becomes an instrument of civil rights activism and cultural dignity in the American South.
Marian Goodman Gallery Founded
Sets a new standard for international program-building that reshapes the contemporary art market globally.
The Revaluation Era
Female artist auction turnover grows 194% — from $350.6M to over $1 billion annually. The market begins, at last, to reflect what the history always knew.
The revaluation is also institutional. Major retrospectives — Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth, Alice Neel at the Met — have permanently repositioned these artists within the canon, with direct commercial consequences. When an institution certifies genius, the market responds. And increasingly, the institutions are correcting a century of omission.
The Future They Will Build
The question is no longer whether women belong at the center of the art world. They always did. The question now is what they will build with the full weight of institutional recognition behind them.
The next generation of female collectors, advisors, museum directors, and artists are entering a market that — for the first time in its history — is structurally inclined to value their contributions in real time, rather than a century later.
We expect to see female artists continuing to outperform the broader market, as institutional rehabilitation accelerates and a new generation of collectors — more global, more diverse, more attentive to the full history of art — shapes demand. We expect female museum directors to drive the most consequential curatorial programs of the next decade. And we expect the most sophisticated collectors to increasingly understand that buying women artists is not an ideological act — it is an informed one.
At Bultman Advisory, we advise our clients to look at the full arc of art history — and to understand that some of its most important chapters are still being written, right now, by women. The collectors who recognize that will build collections that matter.
We have always known this. It runs in the family.