An unusually political Sotheby's press release read in January 2019, "Once Overlooked, Female Old Masters Take Center Stage," highlighting the work of artists Michaelina Wautier, Fede Galizia, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, and Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau.

Because their names are just as long as those of their male contemporaries, the only way to make people more aware of them is to lapse into corduroy-blazer-wearing art historian mode and drop their first names, making them into one-word brands, as "Wautier, Galizia, Le Brun, and Bouguereau." Their similarities - geographically, chronologically, and socially - do not make their work any less great. On the contrary, the work of these artists, and many others, is evidence that Wautier and the Old Masters-who-are-not-men were in fact the predecessors of Monet, Courbet, and even Duchamp.

The writer Judd Tully came back, with a vengeance, a few days later, penning an article with the name: "Are Female Old Masters an Untapped Market or a Marketing Ploy? Experts Are Divided, But Buyers Don’t Seem to Care." It almost hurts to read that. It seems like marketing ploys tend to tap markets, after research. But Tully means: is this a fad? Shouldn't we just pour some boxed wine, put on some classical contemporary, and try to figure out who the masters of 2019 are? I dunno, Tully. Maybe not. Somewhere you can hear the words of the poet Audre Lorde: "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

Sotheby's is right to do this as private corporation, to rewrite the art historical curriculum, because the term "Old Master" needs to expand in order to facilitate the study and the interpretation of art by large numbers of people, not just men. One would have to seize the "master's tools" and put them in a hole in the ground somewhere, or a satellite heading toward another galaxy: the "master's tool," in the art history world, is a certain wastefulness and poetic flourish with the language–this is the masterwork, that is the masterpiece, this is the Old Master. Who was the Old Master's Old Master? Or what if the Old Master was young?

I love a good mystery story, and this one is even better than the BBC's "Fake or Fortune?"–The Rubens House Museum in Antwerp is hot on the trail of the Five Senses, a symbolic, illustrative series by Wautier, which evokes Arcimboldo's Four Seasons and Elements. Wautier's conversation with Arcimboldo defined European culture for the next several generations, even if almost nobody alive but her family and a few others had heard Wautier's name. To make things even more enticing, both Arcimboldo and Wautier had Habsburg patrons who sought to establish, subconsciously, their ambition to reign for eternity by means of symbols in paintings they commissioned. Almost all of the Five Senses works are signed by Wautier and dated 1650. Jean-Baptiste Foucaurt purchased the Five Senses series in 1898. Unfortunately, art historians only have one image of the series, a black-and-white photograph of Hearing, depicting a flute player, in the Parisian art magazine Drouot in 1975. The Rubens House is also looking for the Wautier which has been incognito, if it still exists intact, since 1985, Garland with Butterfly.