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Gail Levin

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Occupation
  
Art historian


Name
  
Gail Levin

Gail Levin facultybaruchcunyeduglevinimages20945612022

Subject
  
Art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Notable works
  
Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist

Notable awards
  
Honorary Doctorate from Simmons College

Books
  
Edward Hopper: An Intimate B, Becoming Judy Chicago, Hopper's places, The Poetry of Solitude, Aaron Copland's America

Similar People
  
Edward Hopper, Robert Hobbs, Deborah Lyons

Gail levin explains the origins and inspiration for theresa bernstein a century in art


Gail Levin (born 1948) is an American art historian, biographer, artist, and a Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, Women's Studies, and Liberal Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a specialist in the work of Edward Hopper, feminist art, abstract expressionism, Eastern European Jewish influences on modernist art and American modernist art. Levin served as the first curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Contents

Nicholas hoare reviews lee krasner by gail levin


Early life and education

Levin was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from Northside High School. Levin graduated from Simmons College in 1969 with a B.A. and from Tufts University with a M.A. in fine arts in 1970, and she received her PhD in art history in 1976 from Rutgers University.

Artist

Levin is also an artist who has shown photographs, photo collages, and collages with a solo show at the National Association of Women Artists at its New York Gallery in the spring of 2014. The show included her collage memoir, "On NOT Becoming An Artist," which tells her life in art in pictorial form, beginning with her mother teaching her to paint and then her parents forbidding her to become an artist.

Levin has also published books with her photographs, including "Hopper's Places", in which she identified all of the paintings by Edward Hopper and then located the actual sites and photographed them. In her 1985 review of a related show organized by Levin, Vivien Raynor wrote in the New York Times: "Hopper's Places, a show that is as much about its guest curator, Gail Levin, as about its subject....Miss Levin has been building a small reputation as a photographer, and it is partly in this capacity that she now contemplates her subject....Miss Levin's deductions are invariably enlightening, as when she infers that Hopper's tendency to elongate structures was a reflection of his own great height." In this book, Levin also analyzes the changes Hopper made in his paintings. Since she began this conceptual art project in the 1970s, a number of other photographers have emulated her project.

Curator

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Levin was the curator of a number of landmark touring exhibitions including Edward Hopper: Prints and Illustrations (1979) and Edward Hopper: The Art and The Artist (1980); Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925 (1978); and co-curator with Robert Hobbs of Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (1978).

Levin continues to organize exhibitions for museums internationally.

Publications

Levin is the author of "Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonne." She has published books with her photographs, including "Hopper's Places" and "Marsden Hartley in Bavaria."

Levin is the author of three biographies: "Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography," "Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist" and "Lee Krasner A Biography." Levin also spearheaded a recent revival of the artist Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002) by producing and editing "Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art," a monograph with essays by herself, four of her graduate students, and two other scholars, which accompanies a touring exhibition and a comprehensive research website.

Selected works

  • Lee Krasner: A Biography (2011)
  • Ethics and the Visual Arts, co-edited with Elaine A. King (2006)
  • Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist (2007)
  • Aaron Copland's America, co-authored with Judith Tick (2000)
  • Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (1995)
  • Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonne (1995)
  • Theme and Variation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-garde, 1912-1950 (1992)
  • Marsden Hartley in Bavaria (1989)
  • Twentieth-Century American Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (1988)
  • Hopper’s Places (1985)
  • Edward Hopper (1984)
  • Edward Hopper: Gli anni della formazione (1981)
  • Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (1980)
  • Edward Hopper as Illustrator (1979)
  • Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints (1979)
  • Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years, co-authored with Robert C. Hobbs (1978)
  • Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925 (1978)
  • Foundations and interests

    Levin was the founding president of the Catalogue Raisonne Scholars Association and she serves on the Academic Advisory Council of the Jewish Women's Archive.

    References

    Gail Levin Wikipedia