Janet Sobel: War

"In the 1940s, against the background of modernists' interest in the subconscious, the original art of self-taught artists was in trend. On this wave, Sobel experienced a rapid rise to fame in the New York art environment. Almost immediately it became clear that in the person of Janet Sobel, the art world encountered more than just another curiosity , and with a completely unique and high-quality creative phenomenon. Through the efforts of her son, the artist met the outstanding philosopher, psychologist and teacher John Dewey, gallerist and collector Sidney Janis, artist Marc Chagall.

Around this time, in the early 1940s, Sobel also became friends with the surrealist Max Ernst. Newspapers relished the details of the artist's middle-class life and mockingly recounted stories of how Janet inspired the distinguished artist with her own baked chicken. Max Ernst apparently liked more than just the chicken, as he introduced Janet to his wife, the gallerist Peggy Guggenheim.

Thanks to this acquaintance, Sobel took part in a number of key exhibitions for the history of American modernism and, first of all, in Peggy Guggenheim's project "Art of the Century", which represented the new American art and became a new stage for the era. Janet has had solo presentations in New York galleries and participated in group shows. Regarding the organization of one of the exhibitions in the space of Peggy Guggenheim, Mark Rothko wrote letters to the artist. At this stage, Sobel's works were only occasionally called primitives, instead declaring the author a surrealist.

In the mid-1940s, the artist's work was significantly transformed: she moved from figurative to partial or full abstraction. It was thanks to this period that Sobel entered the history of American art. Critic Clement Greenberg recognized that Sobel's work, which he saw at one of the exhibitions, was the first pictorial work executed in the spirit of allover painting - a very high assessment, considering the importance of this approach for the history of American postwar art. In the late 1960s, William Rubin, the author of a biographical study of Jackson Pollock, an authoritative art critic and curator who was just beginning his long-term collaboration with the MoMA museum, named the works of Janet Sobel as a source of inspiration for Pollock's experiments in the drip painting technique. Two of the artist's works entered the MoMA collection, but, unfortunately, the recognition of the unique author by the art world ended there.

Over the past decades, Sobel's name began to gradually return to the field of view of specialists, however, only today, more than fifty years after the death of the artist, is the time for a full-scale rethinking of her legacy in the context of revising the patriarchal version of the history of American modernism and art of the 20th century. in general".

From an essay by Alisa Lozhkina