Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Koon­ing Foundation/Artists Rights Soci­ety (ARS), New York)

Some­thing must be in the water: now New York mag­a­zine has run an arti­cle by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The num­bers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on dis­play on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum dis­plays art from its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of paint­ing and sculp­ture. Of these, four­teen are by women, or 3.5%. Count­ing artists rather than art­works, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obvi­ously impor­tant factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for some­one who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar:

THE WHIT­NEY MUSEUM OF AMER­I­CAN ART
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
That’s for the permanent-​collection items on view; Kara Walker’s show is downstairs.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
Four women on an oth­er­wise male roster.

THE 2007 VENICE BIEN­NALE
Men: 76%
Women: 24%
As recently as 1995, the lineup was just 9 per­cent female.

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007
Men: 73%
Women: 27%
The upcom­ing fair will be enor­mous: 2,859 artists, about 715 of them women.

MAR­I­ANNE BOESKY
Men: 75%
Women: 25%
But it’s 50-50 in the gallery right now, with work by Liz Craft and a two-​man show.

THE FRICK COL­LEC­TION
Men: 99%
Women: 1%
There are two sculp­tures and one print by female artists in the col­lec­tion, plus some anony­mous work.

As my astute col­league Joshua Kotin pointed out, the really rel­e­vant num­bers are those from Art Basel and the Venice Bien­nale, since those are the best mea­sure of what’s hap­pen­ing right now. Those num­bers, at least, should escape the charge of irrel­e­vance lev­eled by one com­menter at the NYMag website:

It is just absolutely irrel­e­vant and inap­pro­pri­ate to eval­u­ate the inclu­sion of women based on per­cent­ages.* You need to explain why par­tic­u­lar women deserve to be included in the canon, why these women deserve the status of having pro­foundly influ­enced other artists, crit­ics and his­to­ri­ans, and our cul­ture in gen­eral. And any (honest) list you make would never approach even ten per­cent, let alone 51. Why? Because large quan­ti­ties of female artists simply didn’t exist at the level of influ­ence which would war­rant their inclu­sion. Would it be too cliche to sug­gest that you go back and read Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why have there been no great woman artists” of 1971? His­tor­i­cally women have not had access to train­ing, patron­age, or oppor­tu­nity. This is less true the closer you get to the present, hence the greater inclu­sion of women in the depart­ments of film and video.

++++++++

*Note: In the after­math of the “Numbers Trouble” arti­cles we saw a lot of people make a sim­i­lar claim to this one. Even worse, we saw sev­eral exam­ples of people imply­ing that they couldn’t count num­bers because they con­sid­ered them­selves post­mod­ern (i.e. third-​wave) fem­i­nists. For the record, here’s what Jen­nifer Ashton has to say about when num­bers do matter:

So how do the num­bers matter in this con­text? Well, they obvi­ously matter a lot if you think that women are being dis­crim­i­nated against, and if you think that the unequal ratio of women to men in the var­i­ous arenas of poetic pro­duc­tion and recog­ni­tion is an index of that dis­crim­i­na­tion. In many of the ear­li­est main­stream antholo­gies of women’s poetry (and, for that matter, in some of the ear­li­est efforts to col­lect “innovative” women’s writ­ing) this claim was the key ratio­nale for the focus on women. And while a cor­rec­tive agenda of this kind does depend on a very basic essen­tial­ism, it pre­cisely is not the kind of essen­tial­ism I was crit­i­ciz­ing in “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” The effort to redress numer­i­cal imbal­ances does depend on think­ing that poets are gen­dered (there’s no other way we could notice the dis­crim­i­na­tion in the first place) but it doesn’t require us to think that their poems are gen­dered. If an anthol­ogy editor thinks women are being dis­crim­i­nated against, and num­bers reflect that, the num­bers do matter.