Gail Levin - Böcker

A richly crafted tribute to the avant-garde artist and designer Sonia Delaunay, whose boundary-breaking approach is echoed in the volume’s interdisciplinarity and its inspired designWinner of the 2025 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue AwardNamed one of AIGA's 50 Covers for 2024 Described as “the most significant contribution to Sonia Delaunay studies in a decade,” this catalogue sets a new standard for the study of this pioneering avant-garde artist, designer, and entrepreneur (1885–1979). Eschewing traditional chronological structures to better showcase groundbreaking research unifying the artist’s timeless oeuvre across mediums, this publication demonstrates Delaunay’s innate versatility and willingness to create without material limitation using her unique language of light and color. Textiles, fashion, interiors, book art, and more are highlighted across 26 chapters by leading international scholars to give new insight into Delaunay’s strategies of self-promotion, entrepreneurial endeavors, legacy-building efforts, and vast network of collaborators. These in-depth analyses, including previously underinvestigated material such as film, mosaics, tapestries, and interior design, offer a comprehensive perspective on Delaunay’s lifelong effort to unite art with life by harnessing the energy of technological advancement and the beauty of artisanal craftsmanship. Finally, an appendix provides a unique personal note—an epilogue by Patrick Raynaud, the last living member of Delaunay’s atelier—is a touching firsthand account of the artist’s working practices toward the end of her life. The design, by award-winning book creator Irma Boom, embraces Sonia Delaunay’s own approach to layout and typography, rendering a book that unites past and present to become a work of art in its own right. Distributed for the Bard Graduate Center Exhibition Schedule: Bard Graduate Center, New York(February 23–July 7, 2024)

In the acclaimed first edition of Hopper's Places, Gail Levin paired paintings by Edward Hopper with her photographs of the subjects of paintings done in New York and environs, Maine, Gloucester, and Cape Cod to demonstrate how Hopper made art of everyday scenes and how he sometimes made intentional changes from what he observed. For this new edition, Levin has added documentary photographs and Hopper's paintings of sites in Paris, where he painted for several years as a young man, Charleston, Mexico, and the western U.S. to give a broader view of the range of his work and the power with which he transformed his subjects while still remaining faithful to their essential features.

Born to Jewish radical parents in Chicago in 1939, Judy Cohen grew up to be Judy Chicago—one of the most daring and controversial artists of her generation. Her works, once disparaged and misunderstood by the critics, have become icons of the feminist movement, earning her a place among the most influential artists of her time.In Becoming Judy Chicago, Gail Levin gives us a biography of uncommon intimacy and depth, revealing the artist as a person and a woman of extraordinary energy and purpose. Drawing upon Chicago’s personal letters and diaries, her published and unpublished writings, and more than 250 interviews with her friends, family, admirers, and critics, Levin presents a richly detailed and moving chronicle of the artist’s unique journey from obscurity to fame, including the story of how she found her audience outside of the art establishment.Chicago revolutionized the way we view art made by and for women and fundamentally changed our understanding of women’s contributions to art and to society. Influential and bold, The Dinner Party has become a cultural monument. Becoming Judy Chicago tells the story of a great artist, a leader of the women’s movement, a tireless crusader for equal rights, and a complicated, vital woman who dared to express her own sexuality in her art and demand recognition from a male-dominated culture.

New York Times Notable BookLos Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistWall Street Journal—One of Five Best Artist BiographiesEdward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself—and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.

The American artist Theresa Ferber Bernstein (1890–2002) made and exhibited her work in every decade of the twentieth century. This authoritative book about Bernstein provides an overview of her life and artistic career, examining her relationships with contemporary artists. Bernstein's work is noteworthy, even among her more famous male contemporaries such as John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Edward Hopper, all of whom she knew. Working in realist and expressionist styles, she treated the major subjects of her time, including the fight for women's suffrage, the plight of immigrants, World War I, jazz, unemployment, racial discrimination, and occasionally explicitly Jewish themes such as a synagogue interior or ritual objects such as a menorah. She was a member of the American Artists' Congress and painted a mural for the U.S. government during the Great Depression. Bernstein's portrait subjects include Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin, and Billie Holiday, yet it is her particular sensibility and empathy with those subjects that set her apart from her mostly male contemporaries. Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art includes thematic essays by Michele Cohen, Patricia M. Burnham, Elsie Heung, Sarah Archino, Stephanie Hackett, Gillian Pistell, and by the editor, Gail Levin. It features more than two hundred images, including full-color reproductions of her art and rare documentary photographs, many published here for the first time. It also includes a detailed chronology of Bernstein's life, a list of public collections, and a list of her writings.