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| Milky Way series |
"Contrary to established myth . . . Jackson Pollock's 'signature' style [his so-called 'drip paintings'] wasn't his invention at all, but the brainchild of another artist, one whose extraordinary story confounds and invigorates our understanding of one of the most celebrated contours in recent cultural history. Put simply, modern art has a problem. Her name is Janet Sobel."
I saw this painting that I liked (to the left) and thought it was a Jackson Pollock. Wrong.
It was posted on the Female Artist in History site and the artist was Janet Sobel. Really? I noted that Sobel was Ukrainian-American, which interested me right away, and that she was a friend of John Dewey, one of my favorite early 20th-century educational reformers. I had discovered Dewey when taking an Intellectual History class with Professor Bill Taylor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now I'm discovering the story of a woman artist hidden from public view named Janet Sobel (1893-1968), who, it turns out, is really the forerunner of Abstract Expressionism. It was she who influenced Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Not the other way around.
I saw this painting that I liked (to the left) and thought it was a Jackson Pollock. Wrong.
It was posted on the Female Artist in History site and the artist was Janet Sobel. Really? I noted that Sobel was Ukrainian-American, which interested me right away, and that she was a friend of John Dewey, one of my favorite early 20th-century educational reformers. I had discovered Dewey when taking an Intellectual History class with Professor Bill Taylor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now I'm discovering the story of a woman artist hidden from public view named Janet Sobel (1893-1968), who, it turns out, is really the forerunner of Abstract Expressionism. It was she who influenced Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Not the other way around.
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| Burning Bush |
Art critic Clement Greenburg in the mid-1940s and 1950s described Sobel's work as "primitive," denigrated her work as that of a "housewife," while praising Pollock's paintings as "innovative and masculine to the core." Yes, "masculine to the core." He, along with other critics, puffed Wyoming-born Pollock up as a kind of Marlboro Man conquering his paintings like a Wyoming cowhand, free from tradition, a Wild West art warrior.
It was a myth. It was t
he height of patriarchy in the American art scene.
She was born Jennie Lechovsky in a small Jewish village in eastern Ukraine, near what is now Dnipro in Lugansk oblast and under Russian obliteration bombing. Her mother and three siblings escaped to the US after her father was killed in a vicious anti-Semitic pogram. They arrived in New York City in 1908. Sobel was fifteen years old. A few years later, she married Max Sobel, an engraver and goldsmith, and raised five children. The Russian-Jewish enclave in Brooklyn provided a safe haven for a young mother who had escaped anti-Semitism in this World War II era.
We are still uncovering the brilliant women artists who worked in the shadows of these male artists. Janet Sobel is one of them.
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| Sobel, "Milky Way" series |
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| Sobel, "Hiroshima" |
Sobel didn't begin painting until her mid-40s, apparently when her son Sol gave up art and gave all his painting materials to her. She began by experimenting with canvases laid out on the floor, using a style that came to be called "drip painting" and "all-over painting," in which no surface is left bare or untouched.(Note 4 below)
It was, for Sobel, a housewife, mother, and grandmother, a moment of self-expression. You can feel a sense of freedom in her work. Talent unbound.
Sobel enjoyed a brief spurt of public recognition in the late 1940s, then disappeared from view, and viewings of her art, when her husband moved the family from Brooklyn to Plainsfield, NJ for business reasons. Away from the vibrant New York art scene, she seemed to become lost into the role of suburban wife and mother, the very women Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Apparently there was some talk that she had developed an allergy to something in paint, but her more modern granddaughter asserted that it was more an allergy to Suburbia than paint. The rise of what Friedan called the Feminine Mystique, prescribing a narrow role for women in the private arena of hearth and home, while men dominated the public arena, left it's mark. Sobel was one of its victims, I think, although she never talked about it..
It was this moment in her life, inhabiting the meaning of living in a democracy, that led to her meeting John Dewey, who championed her work. He wrote about her in a catalogue for the Puma Gallery in New York in 1944. She was just getting started. "Her work is extraordinarily free 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 nature, impressions which have been reorganized in figures in which color and form are happily wed." (Note 1)
Her forms and colors also welled up from her experiences under Russian pograms, as well as the economic difficulties her family experienced during the Great Depression, when food was often scarce.
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| Untitled |
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| New York Times photo |
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| How could a piece of art so powerful become so hidden? |
Her art fell into that black hole of neglect that swallowed up lots of female artist then and over time. After 1946, no gallery showed her art during her lifetime. I found that sad. Because she kept painting into her old age.
"A supremely gifted artist, whose work spans folk tradition, surrealism, and abstract expressionism," wrote art critic Victoria Linchong in a May 2022 article, "Sobel deserves wider recognition for revolutionizing 20th century art during a a meteoritic career that was cut short by the patriarchy of her time." (Note 9)
The good new is that Sobel's oeuvre has been recently rediscovered, recaptured and brought to light.
Museums like MOMA and well-known art galleries like Gary Snyder Fine Art in NYC have begun exhibiting and selling the works of women artists so the world knows they existed. Sobel is among them. She is found again. She had left behind "hundreds of paintings," telling us that she continued painting into her obscurity. Some of these paintings are now included in major exhibits, most recently Women in Abstraction, a 1921 exhibit that traveled from the Pompidou Center in Paris to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. And galleries are selling her work. It's about time. Wouldn't it be lovely to grace a wall with one of her paintings, one that influenced Abstract Expressionism and left a legacy of creativity and beauty.
Sources/Notes:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Sobel
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey, 1859 – 1952, American philosopher, educational reformer, a founder of "pragmaticism," a public intellectual. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his deep belief in democracy. Although he is best known for his publications about education, he also wrote about aesthetics, social theory, and art. The latter brought him in touch with Janet Sobel, who shared his beliefs in democracy and an educated citizenry.
3. https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/janet-sobel-forgotten-female-artist/ Excerpt from Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, 2017, MOMA. "Sobel’s artistic technique became later known as "drip painting“ when it was adopted by Jackson Pollock. Sobel’s artwork from 1945 entitled Milky Way is a prime example of the artist’s “drip technique." Pollack knew Sobel's work, and he adopted it for himself. While art critics dismissed and belittled her work, arts patron Peggy Guggenheim noticed Sobel’s work and decided to include it in her gallery, The Art of this Century, in 1945" Jackson Pollock, himself, visited this gallery and ultimately admitted that Sobel’s work “had made an impression on him." Unfortunately for Sobel, her work was overshadowed by her male counterparts in an Abstract Expressionist movement that was male-dominated. Thus did time forget her as the true creator of the “drip painting” technique for which Jackson Pollock became so well-known.
4. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220307-janet-sobel-the-woman-written-out-of-history, by Kelly Grovier, March 2022. It's about time that Sobel is being recognized for her contribution to art history.
8. https://gaillevin.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2014/03/Janet-Sobel-Primitivist-Surrealist-and-Abstract-Expressionist-2005.pdf, an article by art historian Gail Levin.
9. https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/05/11/before-pollock-saw-her-work-a-ukrainian-woman-pioneered-drip-painting/by Victoria Linchong, May 20,2022.
Note: Trying to access some of these links doesn't work, they are "hidden," but I'm including them in case I want to use them for future reference.
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