Gail Levin's new book, "Lee Krasner: A Biography," is sure to remain the definitive telling of the artist's life. In addition to her meticulous research, down to the details of Krasner's early days as an art student in New York, Levin brings a personal and professional connection to her subject: as a grad student, she interviewed Krasner and got to know her quite well, and in 1978 she co-curated "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years" at the Whitney Museum. That show played an important role in asserting Krasner's rightful place in the development of abstract expressionism and her already substantial artistic accomplishments from the time before she met Jackson Pollock.

Levin, who has also written biographies of Edward Hopper and Judy Chicago, deftly traces Krasner's personal and professional trajectory while reconstructing the political and artistic ferment of the time. An addition to analyzing Krasner's work and influences, she describes the artist's legendarily trying role as Pollock's lover and nurturer, and explores how the sexism of the time made it an uphill struggle to receive her artistic due.

A sympathetic biographer, Levin tries to correct inaccuracies about Krasner that persisted in the work of Pollock's biographers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, as well as in Irving Sandler's 1970 study on abstract expressionism. The only quibble about such a thoroughgoing biography would have to be that Levin is almost overly enthusiastic in her desire to include every shred of correspondence from Krasner's extended circle and every detail that she's unearthed about even minor characters.

To digest this significant book, ARTINFO has put together this list of seven significant — or just surprising — things revealed by Levin's research.

WOMEN WEREN'T ALLOWED TO PAINT FISH

When Krasner was a student at the National Academy of Design in 1929, a rule was in a place — apparently with no attempt at justification — that women were not allowed to go into the basement. Yet students who wanted to paint fish from life had to do so in the basement, where it was cooler and the smell would not carry. Krasner (whose father was a fishmonger) and her friend Eda Mirsky entered the forbidden territory to paint fish and to challenge a rule to which they objected on principle. The two were then suspended for "painting figures without permission," quite a charge at an art school.

WORKING FOR THE WPA WAS GOOD, BUT NOT A SURE THING

Krasner worked for the WPA for years during the Depression, and said that (unlike her art school experience) there was no discrimination against women in the organization. Yet she had to re-apply for WPA work every few months, and her salary was often reduced with each new appointment. WPA income certainly provided an invaluable lifeline — as well opportunities to build artistic experience — but it was not a sure thing.

KRASNER MAY HAVE BEEN DYSLEXIC

Krasner worked on her paintings from right to left, and this fact, taken along with her lifelong wish to have others read aloud to her, suggests that she may have been dyslexic. However, she studied Hebrew as a child, and could also have been influenced by the fact that Semitic languages are written from right to left. For her part, Levin feels strongly that dyslexia is the best explanation, especially since dyslexics are known to often have strong artistic proclivities.

YOU CAN'T GET AWAY FROM NATURE

Nature looms larger as an issue in abstract art that one might think. While Pollock famously declared, "I am nature!", Krasner had a different take on the matter, telling an interviewer late in life that there are elements of nature in her work, "but not in the sense of birds and trees and water. When I say nature I might mean energy, motion, everything that's happening in and around me. That's what I mean by nature." When asked if she means everything living, she replied, "Yes, and death too, things that are dead, everything."

HER RELATIONSHIP WITH JACKSON POLLOCK IS HARD TO SUMMARIZE

Krasner was bitterly aware that her work was compared to Pollock's in a way that wasn't the case with other artists at the time, in part because they were male. "If de Kooning or Motherwell takes from Pollock, nobody even breathes a word about it," she said. "But with Lee Krasner, wow. It's been a heavy, heavy number." Although some have characterized Pollock as indifferent to his wife's work, Krasner maintained that he always acknowledged what she was doing artistically. His alcoholism and numerous affairs make for painful reading, and the entry in the index for "Pollock, Jackson, neediness of" is a lengthy one. As horrible as his death in a drunk-driving accident was for her as a wife, the fact is that the freedom from taking care of him allowed Krasner to come into her own as an artist.

WOMEN'S LIB, BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

The women's liberation movement was seminal in bringing attention to Krasner's work, and, while she always resisted being labeled a "woman artist" (just as she didn't like to be called an "American artist"), she was grateful for its accomplishments. She blamed the Surrealists, "who treated their women like well-groomed poodles," for the rampant sexism in the art world of her youth. When she received an award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1979, she sent a pithy acceptance speech to be read by none other than Gail Levin: "I am really very pleased — honored — to receive this award from the Women's Caucus for Art. However, I hope for the day when such an award could be a joint acknowledgment from men and women. The belated recognition that I have recently received is largely due to consciousness raising by the feminist movement, which I consider the major revolution of our time. Thank you." She once told an interviewer that "it's too bad that women's liberation didn't occur thirty years earlier in my life. It would have been of enormous assistance at that time."

EVALUATING HER LEGACY

Krasner has a dual legacy: she is responsible for her own amazing artistic output and she also preserved and enhanced Jackson Pollock's reputation. She used much of the wealth from the skyrocketing prices for Pollock's work to endow the Krasner-Pollock Foundation, which provides financial grants to needy artists, after her death. When she passed away in 1984, her first large retrospective had just opened. Though it had not yet traveled to MoMA — a goal for which she had lobbied intensively — she knew that the show would be hosted there. It was not a bad finale for someone who had once received this backhanded compliment from one of her teachers: "This is so good you would not know it was by a woman."