Male art critic is the reason behind Janet Sobel's erasure
Not many of us heard about Janet Sobel, and there is a peculiar reason as to why. There are not many art books or art history outlets that mention her name either. So, what has contributed to the art world sweeping Janet under the rug?
Sobel is the originator of drip paintings, not Pollock.
Quick biography search yields poor results, nothing but a MoMA page linking back to Wikipedia.
Janet Sobel (May 31, 1893 – 1968) was a Ukrainian-American Abstract Expressionist whose career started mid-life, at age 45 . Even with an artistic career as brief as hers, Sobel is the first artist to use the drip painting technique which directly influenced Jackson Pollock.
Janet Sobel was born as Jennie Olechovsky in 1893 in Ukraine. Her father, Baruch Olechovsky, was killed in a Russian pogrom. Sobel along with her mother, Fannie Kinchuk, and siblings moved to Ellis Island in New York City in 1908. At 17, she married Max Sobel and was a mother of five when she began painting in 1937. Sobel became a known suburban artist housewife that inspired the feminist conversation around domestic roles of women. She produced both non-objective abstractions and figurative artwork. Upon recognizing Sobel's talent, her son helped her artistic development and shared her work with émigré surrealists, Max Ernst, André Breton, as well as John Dewey and Sidney Janis.
Now, tea time.
TLDR at the bottom.
According to The Art Newspaper article from August 2020, a researcher Carter Ratcliff in an upcoming (now released) essay about Lee Krasner and her unacknowledged importance, has showed us the missing piece in the Sobel saga.
“Critic Clement Greenberg hedged his bets over the first “allover” artist
Ratcliff unpicks the renowned critic Clement Greenberg’s praise for Pollock, revealing that Greenberg also credited the little-known Ukrainian-US artist Janet Sobel with originating the “allover” technique and style. Ratcliff writes:
In 1944 Peggy Guggenheim exhibited paintings by Janet Sobel, an art-world outsider whose drip method prompted Clement Greenberg to state in 1961 that these were “the first really all-over images” he had ever seen. This was awkward because the critic had made his reputation, in large part, by glorifying Pollock as the sole progenitor of alloverness. The critic said that Pollock, too, had admired Sobel’s drip paintings, if only “furtively,” and “later admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him”.
Ratcliff’s research shows how Greenberg conveniently erased Sobel from the “allover” art historical lineage. In the footnotes, Ratcliff points out that when Greenberg first published his essay ‘American-Type Painting’ in the Partisan Review in 1955, he did not mention Janet Sobel. “She appears only in the version of the essay revised in 1961 for inclusion in Art and Culture. These revisions were subsequently dropped when the essay was included in Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, where it occupies pages 217-235,” Ratcliff writes.”
As we continue reading the essay, Ratcliff turns the conversation into a debate on Sobel’s legitimacy as an Abstract Expressionist, guiding his argument that utilizing drips in one’s work doesn’t necessarily make them a drip artist per se. Another man attempting to discredit woman’s work.
Sobel’s work was shown alongside Rothko, Pollock, Krasner, Mitchell, Frankenthaller, and others in the Abstract Expressionism exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art in 2016. In case we are still debating whether Sobel was an Abstract Expressionist or not.
TLDR:
we know that Pollock admitted to Sobel being his inspiration for drip paintings
1944-45 - The Women exhibit, at the Guggenheim gallery, where Sobel’s work was shown amongst others. A bunch of people (art critics and Pollock) attend.
1946 - Peggy Guggenheim gave Sobel a solo exhibit.
Because she is a woman, some critics name her a “primitive” artist.
Sometime after seeing her work, Pollock makes a statement that he is inspired by Sobel’s work.
1955 - male art critic publishes an essay where he does not mention anything about Sobel.
1961 - same critic republishes same essay now adding Sobel as the first “all over painting” artist.
After 1961 - he drops the revisions (so all future published editions do not have Sobel revision) and continues to idolize Pollock. No one knows about Sobel.
Other articles, which surfaced after publication of this post, that go more in depth on her background and history.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/janet-sobel-ukrainian-abstract-artist-2111646
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/janet-sobel-forgotten-female-artist/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/obituaries/janet-sobel-overlooked.html
