Born: 31 May 1894, Ukraine
Died: 11 November 1968
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Jennie Olechovsky or Lechovsky
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40, and Sobel is also featured in her book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In 1947, Jackson Pollock created an artform out of dripping and flinging paint across canvases—except a Ukrainian-American grandmother, Janet Sobel, had already been doing it for years. We know for a fact that Pollock was familiar with her work more than a year before he began using similar techniques—it is documented that he attended an exhibition of her work in 1945 and was impressed by it. He didn’t even get creative with naming conventions (see his 1947 Galaxy vs her 1945 Milky Way).
It makes sense that the “drip” technique and “all-over painting” style (where the surface of a work is approached holistically from all directions) would have originated with Sobel, who had no previous artistic training. When her 19-year-old son Sol became frustrated with his own artistic endeavors, he passed on his supplies to his mother, reportedly telling her, “If you’re so interested in art, why don’t you paint?” So she did, making history in the process.
Jennie Lechovsky was born in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine to a Jewish family in 1893. When she was 15, she, her mother and three siblings fled the anti-Semitic pogroms that killed her father. They arrived in New York in 1908, where she would marry the following year, going on to raise five children. It wasn’t until 30 years later that, as the BBC puts it, “With no inculcated allegiance to any artistic school or prejudice regarding the appropriateness of materials, Sobel began playing both with what a painting can say and how it can say it. Using unconventional implements such as glass eye-droppers to squirt paint and the strong suck of a vacuum to drag wet splatters into thin gossamers that no traditional brush could spin, she assaulted the surface of canvases laid out on the floor, orchestrating a liquid lyricism of spills, splashes and spits the likes of which had never before been seen.”
It’s worth noting that a younger Sobel—perhaps one that had not married at 16, and had instead gone on to art school—may not have had the confidence to take up artistic space in the ways her 45-year-old self began doing. She may have felt she needed training to be a “real” artist—an insecurity many artists of any age face. “Without any instilled deference to rules that mustn’t be broken—and with the fearlessness of someone who had survived the traumas of religious persecution and the hardships of the Great Depression—Sobel unselfconsciously set about inventing art as if entirely from scratch,” writes the BBC.
Her son, Sol, became his mother’s biggest advocate, contacting artists like Marc Chagall, whose own survival of anti-Jewish pogroms shaped his life and work, and the influential art collector Sidney Janis, who helped establish the reputations of major artists like Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Pollock himself. Her breakthrough came in 1944, when her debut solo show, at the Puma Gallery on 57th Street, garnered acclaim for her work’s “astounding sophistication” and “absolutely unrestricted” imagination. Janis featured her work in a major exhibition, Abstract and Surrealist Painting in America, that toured the country that year, predicting that Sobel “will probably eventually be known as one of the important surrealist artists in this country.” The iconic art promoter Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel in The Women at Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery, offering Sobel her own solo show the following year.
But just as she was gaining a steady foothold in the New York art scene—no easy feat either then or now, particularly for women artists—her husband effectively ended her burgeoning career. He moved the family from Brooklyn to Plainfield, New Jersey to be closer to his business. Sobel, unable to drive, was cut off from the New York art community. Adding to the dilemma was Peggy Guggenheim’s decision to move to Europe, closing her gallery, which otherwise likely would have continued to show Sobel’s work in the future. Even Sobel’s own body turned against her, as she developed an allergy to the paint she used. As Pollock skyrocketed to fame in the late 1940s, Sobel was all but forgotten, dying in obscurity in 1968 and leaving us to only wonder at what she might have accomplished in those remaining 20 years but grateful to have the works she did create in her short but powerful career. Critic Emily Genauer wrote in 1944, “Mrs. Sobel is a middle-aged woman who only recently took up her brushes. The results are rather extraordinary.”