Art: Janet Sobel.
Janet Sobel (1893–1968) was born Jennie Lechovsky in a Jewish settlement in Ukraine. Her contributions to abstract expressionist sensibilities is acknowledged in the book Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art.
Is Jackson Pollock famous because he made drip paintings or because what he made that way speaks to people? I’m inclined to say the results matter more than the technique. But Pollock apparently gets credit for a woman’s discovery that inspired him.
Noah Charney at Literary Hub writes, “We’re supposed to think that Jackson Pollock invented drip painting, and with it the American branch of Abstract Expressionism. … The first drip, or all-around painting — made by the revolutionary technique of splattering and dripping paint on the fly while approaching the canvas from all angles, as it lay on the floor — was Pollock’s 1947 Galaxy. Wasn’t it?
“It makes for a good story. Pollock was the macho, hard-drinking, Wyoming-raised cowboy of postwar American art — Hemingway with a paint bucket. … He remains one of the two most famous American painters, along with Andy Warhol. Americans, especially American men in the 1940s and 1950s, blazed trails and cast their shadows across the globe. …
“That’s [the narrative my book] Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art seeks to correct. … Let’s begin by gently bumping Jackson Pollock off his pedestal. …
“Janet Sobel (1893–1968) was born as Jennie Lechovsky in a Jewish settlement in Ukraine. Her father was killed in a pogrom, the trauma of which prompted her to move to the United States, with her mother and three siblings, in 1908. A year later she married and went on to raise five children. It was decades later that she first picked up a paintbrush, when her then nineteen-year-old son passed his art supplies off to her. He’d won a scholarship to the Art Students League but didn’t plan to take it.
“She tried to convince him to do so, to which he replied, ‘If you’re so interested in art, why don’t you paint?’
“So paint she did. She was entirely untrained, and that has often been a good thing. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, it was considered a feather in one’s cap to be an ‘academic painter,’ as the best artists were emerging from the early days of the academy system. But from the nineteenth century onward, being called an ‘academic painter’ would be more of an insult. …
“Sobel experimented. She would squirt paint directly out of a tube, drip it with an eyedropper, even pull wet paint across the canvas using suction from a vacuum cleaner. She didn’t set her canvases on easels but laid them on the floor so she could attack them from all angles. As art historian Kelly Grovier wrote, ‘she assaulted the surface of canvases laid out on the floor, orchestrating a a liquid lyricism of spills, splashes and spits, the likes of which had never before been seen.’ Sobel’s first drip painting was one she’d call Milky Way and finish in 1945 — two years before Pollock ‘invented’ drip painting.
“One of Sobel’s sons, Sol [had written] to the leading tastemakers of the time, including Marc Chagall, who, like Sobel, had fled antisemitic pogroms of his youth and was among the world’s most famous painters.
“But he also wrote to Sidney Janis, a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who had been an advisor to MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) since 1934 and who would be described today as an art world influencer. Janis saw Sobel as one of the great Contemporary American artists (along with others who were immigrants to America, including Willem de Kooning and Marko Rothko). …
“Another hugely influential woman, Peggy Guggenheim, also included Sobel in a high-profile exhibition she promoted called ‘The Women.’ But these were all in 1944 and featured Sobel’s work prior to her innovation of the drip technique.
“Guggenheim was so impressed with Sobel that she also put on a solo show for her at her gallery, Art of the Century. That ran in 1946 and did include [drip painting] Milky Way. The leading art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg, wrote about visiting that exhibit with Jackson Pollock in 1946. Greenberg recalled the exhibit with a combination of dismissive misogynism toward Sobel and an admission that she had inspired Pollock.
“He wrote that he and 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. … The effect — and it was the first really “allover” one that I had ever seen — was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.’ “
You can read more at Literary Hub, here.
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