These artworks were made by women, but men get the credit

Some scholars have argued that Marcel Duchamp’s Inverted Urinal, titled The Fountain and signed “R Mutt,” was also her work. Irene Gammell in Baroness Elsa (2002) cites a 1917 letter Duchamp sent to his sister Suzanne, in which he wrote: “One of my friends, under the masculine pseudonym Richard Mott, sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” “While definitive proof of the Baroness’s involvement may be missing, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to her artistic imprint,” Gammell asserts.

Margaret Keane

5. Tomorrow is Forever (1963) by Margaret Keane

The 2014 biographical film Big Eyes, directed by Tim Burton and starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz, tells the story of American artist Margaret Keane, whose wide-eyed canvases sold astonishingly as paintings, prints, and postcards in the early 1960s. But it was believed to be the work of a man. Helen Gurriel’s analysis of 5,000 paintings, referenced in her book Why Women Can’t Paint (2020), revealed that “when men’s work is signed, its value rises,” while the opposite is true for women.

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While Margaret was shy, her soft-spoken husband, Walter, was an excellent salesman. He forced her to let him front her artwork and take full credit for her paintings, which she signed simply as “KEANE.” After Margaret divorced Walter, his insistence that he had painted the paintings led to an unusual confrontation in court in which both parties were placed in front of an easel and asked to paint in front of a judge. Walter pleaded with his sore shoulder and left his canvas blank, while Margaret’s instantly recognizable big-eyed baby, known as Exhibit 224, was completed in less than an hour.

Michaelina Wattier It is at the Royal Academy in London from 27 March until 21 June 2026. It is organized in cooperation with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

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