Biography from AskART:
| The following is from Gary Snyder Fine Art:
Janet Sobel is best known as the self-taught artist whose drip paintings of the early 1940s influenced Jackson Pollock. Her work has been acclaimed both in the "high" art world of Abstract Expressionism, and in the "outsider" or "Folk Art" world of self-taught artists
Sobel was born in 1894 in the Ukraine, emigrated to New York in 1908, and
married and raised a family of five children before becoming, "one of America's most talked about surrealist painters." Completely untrained, Sobel first painted in 1937 at the age of 43. She began with figurative images that were painted in a primitive style. By 1943 her work had moved into a spontaneous expressionistic style of abstraction that gained her serious admiration among such art world luminaries as Peggy Guggenheim, the surrealists Max Ernst and Andre Breton, the philosopher and educator John Dewey and critic and collector Sidney Janis.
Her first one-person show was at Puma Gallery at 108 West Fifty-seventh Street in 1944; a short essay about Sobel by John Dewey introduced the checklist. In addition she was in the Women show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, in 1945. Her abstract painting attracted the attention of Max Ernst, Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Sidney Janis, who wrote the foreword to the pamphlet accompanying her one-person exhibition in 1946 at Art of This Century.
Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock attended the Peggy Guggenheim exhibition in 1946. Greenberg later recalled that after seeing Sobel's all-over drip paintings, "Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively. The effect and it was the first really all-over one that I had seen, since [Mark ] Tobey's show came months later, was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him."
This is the second exhibition of Sobel's work at Gary Snyder Fine Art, and her work will occupy both large gallery exhibition spaces. The first show was greeted with strong reviews - for text of reviews please go to ModernAmericanArt.com, Upcoming Exhibitions.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is from Haberarts:
Art reviews from around New York
The Grandmother of Drip Painting
John Haber in New York City
Janet Sobel
Janet Sobel would have waited more than fifty years for this show. She deserves better. Her paintings make one wonder afresh at Abstract Expressionism and an almost forgotten woman's life.
Or perhaps she deserves two concurrent shows, for the two images she left behind. They sit awkwardly, like two provocative footnotes that an author cannot quite fit into the text. To his credit, Gary Snyder's big new Chelsea space gives one a chance to linger over them both. Untitled/JSC132 (Gary Snyder Fine Arts ModernAmericanArt.com, c. 1946)
The thick of things
One story charts a fantastic debut and a life in the thick of things. Make that literally thick. If she needs a one-liner, she may have made the first drip painting. Clement Greenberg thought so, or at least said so, and he reported the impression that her solo show made on Jackson Pollock. I can sure say the impression she made on me just a few years ago. At the Modern, where two of her works entered after her death in 1968, I felt that I had discovered for myself a beautiful, defining moment.
And then one hears those dismissive tales of the amateur, the folk painter. Greenberg, reports a leading biography of Pollock, found her "slightly balmy." Even to feminist art histories, she has rated at best a passing notice. One volume pretty much dismisses her as unable to break free after all of the old constraints, as if that alone could exclude creativity and pleasure. A book-length reappraisal of Lee Krasner and other women omits so much as a mention.
So who is right? One always likes to say that the truth lies somewhere in between. In fact, it cuts directly across both. And that, things turn out, leaves one with a real body of work worth knowing. It also says quite a bit about a generation's complex pathways. It sheds light on Abstract Expressionism's complex ideas of gender and "the primitive."
Like so much of that generation, Sobel came to America from Eastern Europein her case the Ukrainebut became very much a part of New York City. I can imagine a young Krasner hearing much the same accent from her Russian parents and neighbors. As for Krasner, too, marriage deferred too many other aspirations. Krasner had a big baby to tend, her husband, and Sobel had the more traditional kind.
Even Sobel's family cannot say that she long dreamed of the arts, and one treats her initiation as a grown woman's fancy. Still, something must have run in the family. She could count John Dewey as a long-time friend, and her son took up painting. Whatever the case, he served as a springboard. In 1937, at age 43 and with her kids at last on their own, she took a look at his art, and he unaccountably found her doodling with his supplies. I like to imagine an old-fashioned mother having to correct everything he touched.
Thankfully, he encouraged her, and she entered some heady circles. Dewey himself had the essay for her show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century. Pollock saw her work in 1946, when he needed it most. Then, just two years later, she may have quitor maybe not, for precise dating grows all but impossible. In any case, her son now had enough to do between a career and children. Now, with less encouragement, the grandmother drops out of sight.
But just what did she leave behind? Snyder shows forty-one paintings from the artist's estate and half a dozen more. (He also had two others in a group show last summer.) All date from after she had worked for a good five years. They make any thought of a naïve hobbyist untenable.
Like Pollock's, her subject veers between people and abstraction. As for him, too, the people look at once childlike and decidedly sexual. They define the space around them by their sheer presence, with little in the way of landscape to help fix one's bearings. Painting is a direct encounter with something unfamiliar but alive.
Technique and imagery contribute, and both suggest a thorough awareness of art-world currents. Sobel works mostly in oil, but she has a fondness for mixing in sand, and crucial drip paintings from 1946 use enamel. Maybe she just played in the sand, especially with her children, but George Braque's late still-life, filled with such texturing, was entering American collections. One may never know who first picked up house paint, but Pollock's most delicate studies in oil and enamel date to 1943, and Willem de Kooning was trying it as well. Pollock saw Sobel when the anxious artist felt himself starting over. Still, they and others were moving, independently and as a close circle, in much the same directions.
The imagery, too, shows no lack of currency. The vogue for Jungian analysis obviously contributes to the tiny beings running about. Sometimes they line up in tiers, like a contrast between conscious and unconscious layers. Then, too, American art had seen plenty of conscious journeys back and forth in two dimensions. Think of the Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence. Think of the lonesome subway platforms of urban realism.
While the people have a definite appeal, one no doubt comes for the drip paintings. Did she invent them? Better to say that they each found what they needed in Surrealismor perhaps that it came to them, given its connotations of chance and receptivity. Either way, paint moves freely, one color flowing into the next. Her work really does have that all-over fabric one thinks only Pollock achieved. And yet it has an intimacy all her own.
If paint, in the hands of her peers, itself stands for a person, she is not looking for an idol or a challenge. She finds friendsor a chance to pose for admiration herself. Even the figures from the unconscious come bearing flowers and flirtatious smiles.
By the same token, anyone expecting a grand breakthrough is in for a disappointment. Sobel moves freely between abstraction and figures, with no discernible chronologysometimes in the same patch of paint. In their Pollock biography, Steven Naifah and Gregory White Smith describe Sobel as on "a career path much like Jackson's, although considerably shorter." I might call it less a direct path than a continuing, often hesitant experiment, doubling back when one least expects it. I might find some lessons about the path that Abstract Expressionism took as well.
Sobel's confusing evolution in subject matter makes it hard to know for sure when she stops. So does her technique. Drawing and drips overlap. Sometimes they actually set outlines for one another.
She never gives up on the good old-fashioned easel picture, whereas an abandonment has come to stand for a new approach to space. She is still representing the world to the eye as much as experiencing it with her whole weight. The weave of her abstraction, at its freest and most dense, feels patterned. The outlined people, a bit like cartoons, have the charm of folk art as much as the terror of the unconsciousor of modern life. If feminism, post-modern cynicism, and Greenberg's high Modernism can agree on anything, self-assertion demands more than charm.
I want to end the story here. I have no desire to turn Sobel into the lost Pollock. Krasner does that well enough already. Pollock himself does it even better.
Yet I cannot avoid one more twist in Abstract Expressionism's wonderfully uneven story. In fact, Sobel's career fully reflects the hesitant, human course of a critical art movement. It also helps reveal some of that movement's prejudices.
Start with scale and patterning. Is Sobel really alone? Pollock works magic on a smaller scale with "Sounds in the Grass" and in his sketches. He brings one up to the space between paint, whatever the size. Conversely, Sobel's concerns anticipate the feminist rediscovery of decorative arts.
Or consider figuration and abstraction. Again, Sobel has company. For Pollock or, more notoriously, de Kooning, figures kept emerging right to the end. Krasner knits them into friezes, and Barnett Newman wants his Man the Sublime Hero. Conversely, Sobel anticipates a feminist demand for woman as self-representation, rather than as object of lusts and fears.
No wonder Sobel comes off on the wrong side of "the primitive." Europe had discovered other cultures through its empires, and now collectors brought America a new fascination with African art. Suddenly the primitive took on so many meanings all at once.
It stood for a universal, formal impulse that a new art was about to unleash. It promised a fresh, sympathetic understanding of the outsider, in nations or in culture. It meant the raw power of unconscious desire or the Other, the subject, who might just happen to be female.
The painters of their time took in all of this. It allows a whole new alignment of ideas. It gives them that uncanny ability to become at once defiantly abstract and so very human. It helps explain how a single movement has struck different people as formalism or action painting, the pure representation of space or an artist's self-representation.
At the same time, primitive meant, well, just primitive, as backward or merely trivial. And sure enough, Sobel asks for it. She mimes exotic figures with oversized, totemic heads. Yet they caricature people basically going about their businessand enjoying it to boot. In that male, confrontational world, she begs for condescension. One can never forget that somehow she gave up, and one may never know how to judge that decision in a male world.
In her own way, she discovered, as Newman once wrote, "The Sublime Is Now." Only for her it keeps the specificity and even quaintness of any past year's now. No wonder the work sometimes indeed has the scale of a footnote. No wonder, too, it comes with the wonder of a personal discovery.
Ironically, Newman wrote that the year Sobel probably retired from painting. I am glad to have her back.
Source:
John Haber." I am indebted to Elinor Sobel Spieler, Sobel's granddaughter, and to Rebecca Shapiro, her great-granddaughter, for telling me more about her. However, all errors in fact, not to mention all nit-witted opinions, are entirely my own."
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|