Museums are keeping a ton of the world’s most famous art locked away in storage

Featured on qz.com

Most of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is in storage.

Nearly half of Pablo Picasso’s oil paintings are put away.

Not a single Egon Schiele drawing is on display.

Since the advent of public galleries in the 17th century, museums have amassed huge collections of art for society’s benefit. But just a tiny fraction of that art is actually open for people to view and enjoy—including, it turns out, many works that are considered masterpieces. The dynamic raises questions about who actually benefits when museums collect so much of the world’s best art.

To paint a picture of these curatorial decisions, Quartz surveyed the holdings of 20 museums in 7 countries, focusing on the work of 13 major artists. In total, we collected data for 2,087 pieces of art. The statistics above are drawn from our survey, and here are the key results:

Counting masterpieces

Much of the world’s great art is housed in the vast archives of museums with limited display space. The largest museums typically display about 5% of their collection at any time. Wealthy patrons who donate art to these museums often end up hiding it from public view.

Museums don’t usually report what portion of an artist’s work they have on display. The institutions we asked for that information either refused to provide it or didn’t respond to our requests. So we collected the data ourselves using the museums’ own websites, many of which now display all of their art. (Some, like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and London’s Tate made our job easier by also publishing the raw data.)

We surveyed a wide range of museums, including some of the world’s largest, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art (NGA), and Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. (Here is the full list of surveyed museums, including many that couldn’t be included in our analysis.)

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