These artworks are by women – but men got the credit

Some scholars have argued that Marcel Duchamp’s upturned urinal, titled Fountain and signed “R Mutt”, was also her work. Irene Gammel in Baroness Elsa (2002) cites the 1917 letter Duchamp sent to his sister Suzanne, in which he writes: “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” Gammel asserts: “While final evidence of the baroness’s involvement may be missing, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to her artistic fingerprint.”

Margaret Keane

5. Tomorrow Forever (1963) by Margaret Keane

The 2014 biopic Big Eyes, directed by Tim Burton and starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz, tells the story of the US artist Margaret Keane, whose kitsch wide-eyed “waifs” sold prodigiously as paintings, prints and postcards in the early 1960s. But they were believed to be the work of a man. Helen Gørrill’s analysis of 5,000 paintings, referenced in her book Why Women Can’t Paint (2020), revealed that “when work by men is signed it goes up in value”, while for women the reverse is true.

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While Margaret was shy, her slick-talking husband Walter was an excellent salesman. He coerced her into letting him front her art business and take full credit for her paintings, which she signed simply as “KEANE”. After Margaret divorced Walter, his insistence that he’d made the paintings led to an extraordinary showdown in court where both parties were set before an easel and asked to paint in front of the judge. Walter pleaded a sore shoulder and left his canvas blank, while Margaret’s instantly recognisable big-eyed child, known as, Exhibit 224, was completed in less than an hour.

Michaelina Wautier is at the Royal Academy, London from 27 March until 21 June 2026. It is organised in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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