The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) began collecting artwork in 1929 and has since amassed almost 200,000 works, all from the last 150 years. Almost 80,000 of these pieces are available through the museum’s online collection moma.org/collection/

MOMA’s online collection features 2,367 paintings. We analyzed 2,356 of these works, only excluding 11 paintings by either unknown or multiple artists. For each painting, we noted the gender and nationality of the artist. Out of the 2,356 pieces, 1,012 artists are represented from a total of 61 countries and territories.

Our analysis is mainly twofold. One half is based on examining trends based on total paintings, with the other examining trends based on total artists.

Our key findings:

• The overwhelming majority of artists represented in the collection are male.
• Females are doing well in recent years
• 6 out of the 10 first paintings in the collection come from Russian artists.
• There are 29 male artists with ten works or more in the collection, while Sherrie Levine is the only female.

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Exploring Gender

Of the 2,256 paintings, 2,085 are done by men, with women only accounting for 271 works. Only 152 women make up the 1,012 artists within the collection.

 

 

The artists with the most paintings in the collection are almost all men, with only one woman (Sherrie Levine) having more than ten works. This graph indicates the gender disparity between the thirteen male and thirteen female artists with the most paintings:

 

 

There are 29 male artists with ten works or more in the collection, while Sherrie Levine is the only female.

Including Levine, those 30 artists account for 23.8% of the collection. Picasso’s 57 pieces alone are 2%.
 

First Ten Paintings by Women in the Collection

6 Russian artists made it to this list and no Americans.

From 1907, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s painting, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand, is the oldest piece by a woman in the collection. 

Year	Artist	Nationality	Painting
1907	Paula Modersohn-Becker	German	Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand
1910	Gwen John	British	Girl with Bare Shoulders
1911	Gwen John	British	Girl Reading at a Window
1912	Natalia Goncharova	Russian	Landscape, 47
1912	Alexandra Exter	Russian	Cubist Nude
1913	Olga Rozanova	Russian	The Factory and the Bridge
1913	Natalia Goncharova	Russian	Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest
1914	Lyubov Popova	Russian	Subject from a Dyer's Shop
1915	Sonia Delaunay-Terk	French	Portuguese Market
1917	Lyubov Popova	Russian	Painterly Architectonic

 

Over time, the number of paintings by women has increased steadily, but not exponentially by any means. From 1907, the collection only grows by an average of about 2.5 paintings per year for females, while there is an average of almost 18 new paintings by males per year in the same time period. 

The largest increase in female paintings occurred in 1987, with 17 new pieces. Twelve of those are done by Sherrie Levine. Otherwise, the collection does not include more than ten paintings by women in a single year. 

This chart illustrates the collection’s paintings by their year and gender, revealing the huge disparity between the number of paintings by men and the number of paintings by women. However, the chart also reveals that this disparity is shrinking as time goes on.

Gender over Time

 

 

The average year of the paintings is 1954, though most pieces by women are more new. The average year of their paintings is 1971.