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Blake Gopnik is the author of “The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and his American Dream,” a new biography of the great American collector of modern art that appeared in spring 2025 from Ecco at HarperCollins.

His “Warhol,” the first comprehensive biography of the Pop artist, was widely acclaimed and garnered major international coverage upon its release in 2020. It is published in the U.S. by Ecco at HarperCollins and in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane at Penguin. C. Bertelsmann Verlag has released it in German translation, and editions in Swedish, Italian and Spanish are out or forthcoming. He has been the staff art critic at the Washington Post and Newsweek and is now a contributing critic at the New York Times. He has a PhD in art history from the University of Oxford.

Gopnik was born in Philadelphia in 1963 and raised in Montreal, where he received his B.A. from McGill University, with a concentration in medieval studies and Latin. He then earned a PhD in art history from Oxford University for a dissertation on Renaissance realism and the philosophy of representation.

Returning to Canada, in 1995 Gopnik became the editor of Insite, Canada’s leading magazine on architecture and design, and then was fine-arts editor and finally art critic at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. In 2001, he was hired as the chief art critic of the Washington Post, where he spent the following decade writing about art and other aesthetic topics.

He left Washington for New York in  2011 to become art and design critic for Newsweek magazine and its Daily Beast Web site, and later was critic-at-large for Artnet News. He began work on his Warhol book in 2013. In 2015 he was named a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and then in 2017 was awarded a fellowship at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.

Gopnik’s posts on art appear at BlakeGopnik.com and on most social media.

BlakeGopnik.com
Warholiana.com
Twitter: @BlakeGopnik
Instagram: @blake_gopnik