Art Critic Blake Gopnik Named Leon Levy Fellow for His Ambitious Andy Warhol Biography

Acclaimed art critic Blake Gopnik has been named a 2015-2016 resident biography fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Gopnik, an authority on the life and work of Andy Warhol, will work on Andy Warhol: A Life as Art, an ambitious profile of the celebrated Pop visual artist and filmmaker, and Warhol’s first comprehensive biography. It will be published by HarperCollins/Ecco. As part of the fellowship, Gopnik will receive writing space and will partake in seminars and “the intellectual life” of the Graduate Center, CUNY.

After receiving his PhD in art history from Oxford, Gopnik was the chief art critic for The Washington Post for a decade before moving to Newsweek. Currently, he is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and is a critic at large for artnet News (see Unknown Andy Warhol Discovered in Carnegie Mellon Archive by artnet Critic Blake Gopnik and At David Zwirner, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia Goes West in Style).

At the Leon Levy Center for Biography, a fertile source for unique biographical accounts, Gopnik will join other fellows Colin Asher (working on a biography of Nelson Algren), Gordana-Dana Grozdanic (for her biography on Zija Dizdarevic), and Eric K. Washington (for his biography on James H. Williams). Former Leon Levy fellows include Adam Begley (Updike), Langdon Hammer (James Merrill: Life and Art), and Elizabeth Kendall (Balanchine and the Lost Muse).

You can read more facts and quotes about Warhol at Gopnik’s site Warholiana, where in a recent post, the critic attempts to disprove that Warhol ever said what is now his most famous line, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Congrats Blake!