A Nerd’s Guide To The 2,229 Paintings At MoMA

Oliver Roeder | fivethirtyeight.com | 28th August 2015

Some light-hearted numbers. A newly public database of MoMA’s paintings has been analysed by a renowned statistician and political analyst. “Oil painting … still dominates in the modern era [47.5% of the collection].” “[T]he average acquired painting was painted about 30 years before it joined MoMA’s collection.” “There are 956 paintings that are wider than they are tall and 1,079 that are taller than they are wide. There are 131 square paintings.”