Women's History Month: Janet Sobel

It is not often that we discover an artist whose work may have had a major impact on the direction of American art. But Janet Sobel is one such artist. You think Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was the first artist to produce drip-and-splatter paintings? Think again!

Janet Sobel (1894–1968, United States, born Ukraine), Untitled, ca. 1946. Oil and enamel on composition board, 17 ⅞" x 14" (45.5 x 35.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist. (MOMA-P3012)

According to her son, Sol, Sobel developed ideas after preparing the ground for a painting. This sudden conception was matched by an equally rapid execution. Sobel poured the paint, tipped the canvas, painted on the floor, and blew the wet lacquer. In this untitled painting, she achieved a jewel-like, marbled surface by using fast-drying enamel paint. Her automatic technique has been likened to that of the Surrealists. Sobel once said she only painted what she felt.

Throughout the history of American art, there have been artists whose vision is so personal that it cannot be easily fit into a category. Examples of this in the 1800s include David Gilmour Blythe (1815–1865), John Quidor (1801–1881), Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919), and Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). While their vision was unusual, none of these artists ever truly strayed from the American naturalistic tradition. In the 1900s, after the advent of and acceptance for abstraction in American art, many artists with intense, personal visions were free to explore this mode of expression. These personal visions span the range of total abstraction to representational abstraction, regardless of what the current “trends” in American art were.

Born Jennie Lechovsky in a Jewish town near present-day Dnipro, Ukraine, Sobel and her family immigrated to New York after her father was killed in a Russian pogrom (an organized massacre of ethnic groups). Sobel began painting in 1939 at her home in Brooklyn when she had the urge to create. Her son, who was studying at the Art Students League, encouraged her in painting. He showed her paintings to gallery owner Sidney Janis (1896–1989), who included her in the 1943 show American Primitive Painting of Four Centuries at the Arts Club of Chicago. Her art at the time was similar to Marc Chagall’s (1887–1985), depicting scenes of Jewish life, Ukrainian folk art, floral patterns, and memories from childhood.

Between 1943 and 1946, Sobel’s figurative works began to be enmeshed in swirling, splattered, and dripped paint. This became her main subject matter by 1946. In 1944, Janis included Sobel’s work in the traveling exhibit, Abstract and Surrealist Painting in America. That same year, she had her first solo exhibit at the Puma Gallery in New York. Art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), mouthpiece for the future Abstract Expressionists, and artist Jackson Pollock saw Sobel’s work at the Puma Gallery exhibit. Greenberg declared that Sobel produced the earliest all-over painting. Pollock himself admitted in later years that her work had an impact on his.

Despite being dismissed by most critics as a “housewife who paints,” Sobel secured the patronage of gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979). She was included in Guggenheim’s important group show, The Women, in 1945. Sobel also exhibited work in the Brooklyn Museum’s juried shows from 1943 through 1945. Her descent was as quick as her rise in the art world. After moving to New Jersey in 1947, Sobel lost Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, which closed in New York and moved to Venice. She also developed an allergy to the industrial paints and enamels she preferred. Her later works were drawings in crayons and pastels that did not garner critical impact like her dripped abstractions.

And what was Pollock doing when Sobel painted this work?

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956, United States), Water Figure, 1945. Oil on canvas, 71 ⅞" x 29" (182.7 x 73.7 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © 2025 Pollock Krasner Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (SI-273plars)

Correlations to Davis programs: Explorations in Art 2E Grade 4: 6.7; Explorations in Art 2E Grade 5: 6.4; Explorations in Art 2E Grade 6: 5.1; Experience Art: 6.2; The Visual Experience 4E: 4.2