Who is Janet Sobel? Meet the Self-Taught Female Abstract Artist Who Changed American Art
Move over Jackson Pollock…
Abstract Expressionism looms large over the history of 20th-century art.
Emanating from New York in the 1940s, it produced some of the most monumental nonobjective images that have ever been seen. At its nucleus was Jackson Pollock, who made furious abstract paintings with dripped, flicked, spilt and sloshed paint, all achieved with a gestural freedom that recast modern art and turned Pollock into a household name.
Yet tucked away in the history of this movement is a little-known artist named Janet Sobel, whose influence on Abstract Expressionism — and on Pollock in particular — throws its origins into question.
Labelled a “housewife” by critics, she played an instrumental role in the advent of drip painting and should be considered a contender as the very first Abstract Expressionist.
Pollock’s Performance
A key year in the story of Abstract Expressionism was 1947, when Pollock first experimented with the “all-over painting” — that is, when the canvas is approached from all angles so that no section is considered more important than another — that took as its underpinning his unfettered dripping techniques.
Making sense of a Pollock painting becomes easier if you have seen photographs or films of him hunched over the raw canvas, spooling cans of household paint into cobweb-like creations.
The impression is almost of dancing, with elements of ritual and rhythm contributing to the effect.
Combine this performative component with the artist’s reputation for the hard liquor and fast cars and you quickly get to the all-American anti-hero, who curls his lip around a half-smoked cigarette and shrugs existentially at the thought of conforming to expectations. His early death at the age of 44 in a drink-fuelled car crash transformed his reputation into a cross between James Dean and Vincent Van Gogh — or Van Gogh from Wyoming, as the critic Robert Hughes put it.
Pollock’s paintings and persona were picked up by the notable art critic Clement Greenberg, who took it upon himself to champion Abstract Expressionism and to posit it as the most important art movement of the 20th century, with Pollock as the prototype and artists like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning the progeny.
So potent was this combination of artist and advocate that Pollock’s star rose and rose. In 1949 and 1956 he was featured in both Time and Life magazines under the arresting headlines “Jack the Dripper” and “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Today, his paintings are some of the most viewed and valuable objects in art.
History reconsidered
Where this seductive story begins to show signs of wear and tear is in the all-male bias of its narrative.
Habitually overlooked in the advent of Abstract Expressionism is the role of the artist Janet Sobel who, a decade before Pollock, had pioneered her own drip-painting technique — and moreover could count Jackson Pollock as one of her admirers.
Sobel was a Ukrainian-born American artist who took up painting at the relatively late age of 45.
Born in 1893 to Jewish parents in Western Ukraine (then part of Russia), the threat of anti-semitism and the violence of the pogroms eventually led to her migration to New York at the age of 15 with only her mother (as her father had previously been killed in a pogrom riot).
Encouraged by her son who was an art student, she began to experiment with her own compositions in her Brighton Beach apartment around 1938, when she began to discover her aesthetic instincts. With no formal artistic training behind her, her work carried few of the conventions of Western paintings except for a few key touchstones like Marc Chagall.
At first, she painted on whatever surface she could find, from the backs of envelopes to seashells picked up from the beach. Dreamlike representational works soon gave way to lyrical abstract compositions. Unafraid to experiment with different ways of applying paint, she sometimes used a glass eyedropper to spray or drip paint onto the canvas, and at other times used a vacuum cleaner to drag and smear the still-wet surface into new configurations.
So impressive were the results that her works soon began to gain recognition. Her son, Sol — whose paints she had first borrowed — sought the attention of local art dealers and managed to attract the collector Sidney Janis, notable for promoting European artists like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian and for putting the Abstract Expressionists on a pedestal in his New York gallery.
Impressing other notable figures of the New York art scene, Sobel hosted gatherings at her Brooklyn home, where luminaries such as Surrealist writer André Breton and artist Max Ernst were among her guests.
She went on to have a solo show at the Puma Gallery on 57th Street and then feature in Peggy Guggenheim’s important 1945 exhibition, The Women, at Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery.
Sobel wasn’t finished. As part of her astonishing ascent to prominence, she was also offered her own solo exhibition by Guggenheim in the same Art of the Century gallery a year later.
A work like Milky Way, made in 1945, easily makes the case for Sobel as the first “all over” artist in the American tradition. Made with enamel paint, it is both an intricate filigree of overlapping colours and an energetic commotion of expressive imagination.
Sobel vs Pollock
The meeting of Sobel and Pollock’s creative arc is a matter of recorded history.
Writing in 1955, Greenberg recounted how at Guggenheim’s One Women show:
“..he [Jackson Pollock] had noticed one or two curious paintings shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s by a “primitive” painter, Janet Sobel (who was, and still is, a housewife living in Brooklyn). Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively: they showed schematic little drawings of faces almost lost in a dense tracery of thin black lines lying over and under a mottled field of predominantly warm and translucent color.”
Dismissive as Greenberg’s tone is — notice how he was careful to point out Sobel’s “housewife” status — he proceeded to recognise the lasting importance of the encounter:
“The effect — and it was the first really “all-over” one that I had ever seen, since Tobey’s show came months later — was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.”
Yet it is only recently that Sobel’s self-taught contribution to the story of American art has been recognised. Undoubtedly, gender bias played a part in this invisibility, as did the unfolding circumstances of her personal life.
In 1947, at the very moment of her public triumph — and the same year that Pollock began “dripping” — Sobel moved with her family from Brooklyn to Plainfield, New Jersey, to be closer to her husband’s jewellery business. At about the same time, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery also closed its doors.
Cut off from New York, Sobel effectively left the art scene behind her. She also developed an allergy to paint, which undoubtedly hindered her output. By 1953, she was working in the family business and was a forgotten figure in the art world. She died in 1968, little more than a footnote to Pollock’s canonical prestige.
Janet Sobel may not have achieved lasting acclaim, yet her impact on the course of modern painting surely deserves reevaluation. In the American tradition especially, where artists like Pollock and Rothko are treated almost as mythical beings, Sobel warrants her own place in the story of art — as both a key influence and a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism.
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