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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Chicago Review’s Autumn issue (53:2/3) is back from the press and avail­able now for only twelve dol­lars. Buy a copy today!

POETRY in the issue includes Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (enti­tled “The Book of Adam”); “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” the second half of CD Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war (the first half of which was pub­lished in CR 51:3); and poems by Larissa Szpor­luk, William Fuller, Sarah Gri­d­ley, Roberto Har­ri­son, Mark Tardi, John Peck, Erín Moure, Oana Avasili­chioaei, and Elisa Sampedrin.

FIC­TION includes five short sto­ries by Peter Markus and Jede­diah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart.”

CRIT­I­CISM in the issue includes a defense of real­ism by Georges Perec and a long con­sid­er­a­tion of Hart Crane by Allen Grossman.

The issue also includes a three-​part con­ver­sa­tion on gender in con­tem­po­rary poetry, with an essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, and a note by Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird.

REVIEWS in the issue include:

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