Numbers Trouble: Art Edition
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:
