Gail Levin

An accomplished curator and authoritative biographer, Gail Levin currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books on twentieth-century and contemporary art, as well as the biographies Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (a New York Times notable book and one of the Wall Street Journal's five best artist biographies of all time), Becoming Judy Chicago, and most recently Lee Krasner (William Morrow). As a keynote speaker, Levin has lectured extensively at museums, universities, libraries, and art festivals across the United States and abroad.

Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in Levin's riveting biography and talks, she challenges previous portrayals of Krasner, and shows that she was an independent and resourceful woman of uncompromising talent and prodigious energy. For a decade before she was with Pollock, she lived with a dashing Russian who had ties to the Tsar, was arrested as political demonstrator, was called a "Trotskyite" for speaking out at the Artists Union, and met Eleanor Roosevelt while working on the W.P.A. Though outspoken and sometimes irascible, Krasner was magnetic -- "She had the kind of animal energy and voluptuousness we later came to call sex appeal," said a friend. Levin colorfully analyzes how these events and relationships all contributed to Krasner's mythic status as one of the most polemic artists of the last century.

Among Levin's many awards are a Distinguished Fulbright Chair to the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands, Fulbright Senior Scholar to Japan, numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center Research Fellowship. She also served as president of the Catalogue Raisonne' Scholars Association, an affiliate of the College Art Association.

She lives in New York.

Lee Krasner and Abstract Expressionism

Edward Hopper and American Realism

Judy Chicago and Feminism

American Artists and Political Activism

The Art Market