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:

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