Untitled

Janet Sobel was a mother and a grandmother when she took up painting in 1939, at the age of forty-five. Using materials belonging to her son, Sol, who attended the Art Students League of New York, Sobel painted on anything she could find, including envelopes, paper scraps, and shells scavenged from the beach. Recognizing his mother’s ability, Sol shared her paintings with influential figures, including Max Ernst. Through Ernst, she was introduced to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave her a solo exhibition in 1946. Sobel experimented with enamel paint, often mixed with sand—as can be seen in the granulated surface of Untitled—and adapted glass pipettes from her husband’s costume jewelry business to drip and blow paint in new ways. The result was a body of allover composi- tions characterized by looping lines of dripped and splattered paint. In 1958, the critic Clement Greenberg acknowledged that Sobel’s innovative work had “made an impression” on Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), relating that the pioneering Abstract Expres- sionist had admired “one or two curious paintings” at Guggen- heim’s gallery by “a ‘primitive’ painter.” Yet, just as Sobel was establishing herself, she fell into obscurity: the artist moved to New Jersey in 1946 to be closer to her husband’s business, and her inability to drive left her isolated. In the late 1960s, William Rubin reaffirmed Sobel’s role in the development of drip-painted abstraction and acquired her masterpiece Milky Way (1945) for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.