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.

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*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.