Janet Sobel

Janet Sobel was a Ukrainian-born American painter whose pioneering approach to Abstraction positioned her as a vital yet long-overlooked figure in twentieth-century art. Born Jennie Lechovsky in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro, Ukraine), Sobel immigrated with her family to the United States in 1908, settling in Brooklyn, New York. For much of her early life, she devoted herself to family and domestic duties, only beginning to paint in her forties.

Working largely without formal training, Sobel developed a deeply personal and intuitive style that fused Surrealist imagery with folk motifs and Abstract Expression, leading to her development of all-over compositions and the drip technique. Her early works featured dreamlike compositions filled with totemic figures, ornamental patterning and rich, jewel-like colour, but by the early 1940s, she began to experiment with methods of automatic painting, pouring paint and allowing it to drip freely across the surface. These dynamic, all-over compositions prefigured the gestural Abstraction that would later define the New York School and be attributed to Jackson Pollock.

Sobel’s innovative technique drew the attention of prominent critics and artists of her time, and, in 1944, she was given her first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. The following year, Guggenheim included her in the landmark exhibition The Women where both Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock viewed her drip paintings. Greenberg later acknowledged her as the first artist to use the drip method that Pollock would famously refine. Despite such recognition, Sobel’s career was curtailed by her health and her move away from New York, leading her to fade from the art world’s spotlight.

In recent decades, scholars and curators have revisited Sobel’s work, celebrating her as a visionary who anticipated key developments in postwar Abstraction. Her paintings, vibrant, fluid and brimming with psychological depth, embody a uniquely personal form of Modernism that stands as a testament to creative innovation and the enduring power of self-taught experimentation in shaping the history of Modern art.