Janet Sobel

Janet Sobel (May 31, 1893 – November 11, 1968), born Jennie Olechovsky (occ. Lechovsky ), was a Ukrainian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter whose career started mid-life, at age forty-five in 1938. Sobel pioneered the drip painting technique; her work directly influenced Jackson Pollock. She was credited as exhibiting the first instance of all-over painting seen by Clement Greenberg, a notable art critic.

Early life
Janet Sobel was born as Jennie Olechovsky in 1893 in Katerynoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine). Her father, Baruch Olechovsky, was killed in a Russian pogrom. In 1908, Sobel moved to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with her mother, Fannie Kinchuk, a midwife, and her siblings. Two years later, she married Max Sobel, a fellow emigrant from Ukraine, with whom she had five children.

Career
Sobel was already a grandmother when she began painting in 1937. She produced both non-objective abstractions and figurative art work. Upon recognizing Sobel's talent, her son Sol, an art student, helped her artistic development and shared her work with émigré surrealists, Max Ernst, André Breton, as well as John Dewey and Sidney Janis.

Sobel presented her first solo show at Puma Gallery in New York in 1944. Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel's work in the show Women in her The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945, alongside the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Kay Sage. The following year, she invited her for a solo show at the same space, the brochure for the show was written by Sidney Janis.

From 1943 through 1946, Janet Sobel became a powerful presence in the New York art world. She exhibited in the 27th Annual at the Brooklyn Museum in 1943 (she would also exhibit there in 1944 and 1945).

In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.

Effect of inspiration
Her belief in the ethics of self-realization in a democracy led to Sobel's encounter with philosopher John Dewey. Dewey championed Sobel by writing about her in a catalogue statement at the Puma Gallery in New York in 1944. In this catalogue he states:

"Her work is extraordinarily free from inventiveness and from self-consciousness and pretense. One can believe that to an unusual degree her forms and colors well up from a subconsciousness that is richly stored with sensitive impressions received directly from contact with nature, impressions which have been reorganized in figures in which color and form are happily wed."

Sobel used music for inspiration and stimulation of her feelings into her canvas. She listened to music while she painted. "There was a radio in each of the four rooms of her Brighton Beach apartment, and they played Janet's favorite songs. The music helped to put her in a trance where, armed with a brush, she could discover more and more secret rooms in her subconscious." Sobel's works exemplify the tendency to fill up every empty space, sometimes interpreted as horror vacui. She often depicted her feelings through past experiences. Her depiction of soldiers with cannons and imperial armies, as well as traditional Jewish families, reflected the experiences of her childhood. Her figures often demonstrated the time of the Holocaust, where she relived the trauma of her youth. Overcoming those youthful traumas, Sobel found a safe realm for her imagination through art.

Effect of art critics
Sobel's painting Milky Way (owned by the MoMa) was created in 1945, two years before Jackson Pollock began experimenting with drip painting. The art critic Clement Greenberg mentioned that Jackson Pollock had noticed Janet Sobel's painting in the 1940s. Pollock "'admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him'". In his essay "'American-Type' Painting", first published in 1955, Greenberg cited Sobel's works as the first instance of all-over painting he had seen, but attributed the style to appropriated female nature rather than to artistic creativity. Greenberg went on to say that her art evolved from recognizable figures to a more abstract style of paint dripping. An art authority during Sobel's time, Greenberg wrote on avant-garde painting. Although he had not addressed her during the three years her professional works circulated in New York galleries, he eventually positioned "Sobel as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism". Generally, he only framed Sobel's work relative to Abstract Expressionism or to Pollock, and especially in relation to Pollock's career. He consistently described Sobel's work as inferior to that of Pollock by characterizing it as "'primitive'" and that of a "'housewife'". In certain circles, the effect of his influence was a failure of recognition of her work during her career.

Sobel's paintings were characterized as belonging to "the realms of surrealism and primitivism." "Sobel was part folk artist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist, but critics found it easiest to call her a 'primitive'." As Zalman summarizes, her title of "primitive" was "a category that enabled her acceptance by the art world, but restricted her artistic development". Grouping Sobel as a 'primitive' painter was part of a greater movement to try to form a unique American form of art, distinct from European art, while still trying to maintain a hierarchy of 'us and them'. Sobel was grouped as inferior due to being a housewife, while other painters could have been dismissed as being mentally inferior in some way. In a way, Sobel also serves as a representative of this conflict. Due to the attitudes of some of the critics of her day, Sobel became known as a suburban housewife who, working professionally as an artist, inspired the feminist conversation around domestic roles of women.

Death
Sobel died at her home in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1968. In 2021, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.

Exhibitions

 * 1944: Janet Sobel, Puma Gallery, New York, solo show
 * 1946: Paintings by Janet Sobel, Art of this Century Gallery, New York
 * 1962: Janet Sobel Paintings and Drawings, Swain's Art Store, Plainfield, New Jersey
 * 2002: Janet Sobel: Selected Works from the Artist's Estate, Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York
 * 2005, Janet Sobel, D.C. Moore, New York
 * 2010: Janet Sobel: Drip Paintings and Selected Works on Paper, Gary Snyder/Project Space, New York
 * 2023: Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970, Whitechapel Gallery London
 * 2024: Janet Sobel: All-Over, The Menil Collection, Houston