Janet Sobel
Janet Sobel
1894 - 1968
Born 1894, near Kiev; died 1968, in New York.
Painter.
Little known outside the USA, Janet Sobel may have been the first artist ever to paint all-over drip paintings. Born in the Ukraine, she emigrated with her mother and two brothers to New York in 1908, after her father died in a pogrom. Entirely self-taught, she started to paint in 1937, naive gouaches of still-life reminiscent of Chagall. By 1943, however, her work had moved to a spontaneous form of Abstract Expressionism that attracted much admiration from major figures in the art world.
Her first solo exhibition was at the Puma Gallery, New York, in 1944. In 1945 she was included in the Women Show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century, where her work caught the attention of Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock, and in 1946 she was given a solo exhibition at Art of this Century, at which she showed her drip paintings. ["SOBEL, Janet." Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/benezit/B00171448.]
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