Gail Levin

Distinguished Professor of 20th-Century and Contemporary Art

Professor Gail Levin's research interests are interdisciplinary, traversing American studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies and Asian studies, often focusing on interactions between life and art. Her published work includes major biographies of Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, and Judy Chicago as well as a cultural history, Aaron Copland ‘s America, and essays on the theory of biography. Her most recent book is a monograph, Zayasaikhan Sambuu: Mongolia, Lost and Found. She has just edited a special issue of The Journal of Asian Art and Aesthetics on Chinese women artists, continuing her work inscribing erased women artists into history. Her research on Edward Hopper and Marsden Hartley led her to co-found the Catalogue Raisonne Scholars’ Association. For Hopper, she published the catalogue raisonné in 1995; publishing her catalogue raisonné of Marsden Hartley is a current project.

Levin served as curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as guest curator at the Museum of Modern Art and other venues. Working with a seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center, she organized “Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art,” which opened at the Center's James Gallery in November 2012 and traveled to museums across the country. She edited the related book (University of Nebraska Press), which includes CUNY students among the essayists. Her work as a curator and researcher informs her contribution to the anthology, Ethics and the Visual Arts (2006).

Funding for Levin's research has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Association, the Pollock-Krasner/Stony Brook Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University, Yale University, the Smithsonian Institution, the John Sloan Memorial Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Financial Times, London chose Levin’s Lee Krasner: A Biography, as one of the five best books on Art for 2019. Her biography of Edward Hopper won the School Library Journal Best American Biography; it was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and in 2007, was singled out as one of the “Five Best Artist Biographies” ever by the Wall Street Journal. Also in 2007, Levin received from the National Association of Women Artists their Award for Biography and Art History. Her writing has been translated and published internationally in twenty countries.

See Professor Levin's webpage here.

Publications:

• Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. University of California Press, 2023.

• “Zaya: A Contemporary Mongolian Painter, Melding Music From East and West,” The Journal of Asian Arts & Aesthetics, Vol. 7, 2021, pp. 21–34.

• “Edward Hopper’s Loneliness,” Social Research: An International Quarterly, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 88, Number 3, Fall 2021, pp. 747-770. 10.1353/sor.2021.0038

• “’Anglo-Saxon’: Nationalism and Race in the Promotion of Edward Hopper,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11712. https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/nationalism-and-edward-hopper

• Lee Krasner: A Biography, (New York: William Morrow, 2011, paperback edition, 2012. First British edition, London: Thames and Hudson, May 2019).

• Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist, (New York: Harmony Books, 2007, paperback, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

• Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art. Edited by Gail Levin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
• "Alfred Stieglitz, les compositeurs contemporains et le Modernisme." In Carrefour Stieglitz, edited by Jay Bochner and Jean-Pierre Mortier, 167-178. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012.
• “Aaron Copland’s America,” in Making Music for Modern Dance: Collaboration in the Formative Years of a New American Art, ed. Katherine Teck. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• “Judy Chicago in Fresno,” in Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program and the Collective Visions of Women Artists, ed. Jill Fields. Routledge Press, 2011.
• “The Extraordinary Interventions of Alfonso Ossorio, Patron and Collector of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner” and “Alfonso Ossorio and Zen.” Archives of American Art Journal 50, nos. 1–2 (Spring 2011).
• "Jewish American Artists: whom does that include?" Review essay. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 3 (November 2010): 421-430.
• "Beyond the Pale: Jewish identity, radical politics and feminist art in the United States." Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2005): 205-232.
• "Between Two Worlds: Folk Culture, Identity, and the American Art of Yasuo Kuniyoshi." The Archives of American Art Journal 43, no. 3/4 (2003): 2-17.
• Co-author with Judith Tick. Aaron Copland's America: A Cultural Perspective. Watson-Guptill, 2000.
• Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
• Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, W.W. Norton, 1995 (3 volumes & a CD-ROM); Mosel Verlag G.M.B.H., 1995.
• Theme and Variation: Kandinsky & the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1950. Bullfinch Press, 1992.
• Twentieth Century American Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Sotheby Publications, 1987.