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the art of cooking, the art of sewing and textiles. Sharing historical
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This is a place of learning, encouragement and inspiration.
Introducing Janet Sobel.
Though I only recently discovered this artist's fascinating and tragic story, I was surprised to find just two photographs of her. I asked AI why, and it gave me this response.
"Misogyny and patriarchal snobbery were central reasons why so few photos of Janet Sobel exist and why she was erased from mainstream art history. While rare archival images do show her painting on her stomach on her apartment floor, the systemic gender bias of the 1940s Mid-Century art world prevented her from being documented like her male peers."
It is also highly documented that Jackson Pollock "stole" her invention of drip art. Janet created the all-over drip paintings years before Pollock popularized the style. Pollock himself admitted Janet had an impact on him. Stole is a controversy word, however, being a man he got the credit for it.
But, I'm ahead of the story.
In 1938, a 45-year-old Ukrainian-born grandmother, with no
previous artistic training, began fiddling around with her son's
painting supplies and changed the course of cultural history. Born
Jennie Lechovsky in a Jewish town in eastern Ukraine in 1893, Sobel
escaped the violence of anti-Semitic pogroms (in which her father had
been killed), and arrived in New York with her mother and three siblings
in 1908, when she was 15. Because of her family's financial survival needs, Janet had very little formal education. Her childhood effectively ended at age 16 when she married Max Sobel, a fellow Ukrainian born Jewish immigrant and goldsmith, immediately transitioning into a lifetime of domestic motherhood. She never learned to read or write English. She was married to Max for 58 years.
Much of the next three decades would be
devoted to the rearing of their five children.
There are several different stories about how Janet started making art. Whatever the truth, her son Sol and an art student handed her painting supplies and told her to make art. It was the late 1930's that Janet began to experiment with making art.
Sobel created pioneering drip works like Milky Way in 1945, while Pollock did not begin his signature drip paintings until 1947. Pollock and influential art critic Clement Greenberg saw Sobel’s work at a 1945/1946 exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. Greenberg later acknowledged that both he and Pollock saw and admired those paintings. Greenberg famously dismissed Sobel as an untrained "primitive" or "housewife" painter. Even calling her art "housewife trash."
In addition the media and critics labeled her "primitive" and "untrained," refusing to grant her the intellectual status given to men. Greenberg and other historians actively scrubbed Sobel from the "all-over" art lineage to protect Pollock's prestige.
(Personal note; I have never liked Pollock's art, and the more I learn about him the less I like the man.)
What notoriety Janet did have was ended 1947, at the peak of her success, when her husband moved the family to Plainfield, New Jersey for his business. Janet couldn't drive effectively cutting her off from New York. In addition her primary champion, Peggy Guggenheim, closed her gallery and moved to Europe, leaving Sobel without institutional backing. Art historians widely view the mid-century modern art world as deeply biased against women, framing the erasure of artists like Janet Sobel and Lee Krasner not as accidental oversights, but as systemic exclusion.
These are just of few of Janet's pieces. Janet's art does not exist in public art databases. Historians and dealers estimate she completed more that 1,000 total works. While she was alive she profited very little with her art. Again, because she was targeted by the male mainstream there are no official records.
Today, however, her art makes dealers a very good prophet. Major auction houses like Phillips have successfully sold her premier paintings for up to $76,200 USD, and her works on paper for over $16,500 USD.
In the contemporary art market, her works generally trade between $300 and $16,000, with highly prized oils on canvas sometimes reaching up to $57,000.
Major institutional acquisitions by entities like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and recent exhibitions at the Menil Collection have driven up her estate's value. However, none of these modern windfalls benefited Sobel before her death in 1968.
In other words her art was ripped off at every level.
There is much more to know abut Janet Sobel. Just type in her name.
I hope you enjoyed SITAR.
Nicole
I'm joining Gillena for
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