Janet Sobel: The Type-cast Actor by William Davie
Since her death in 1968 the discourse around Janet Sobel’s artwork has often drifted towards and become snagged around the unsung influence of her all-over drip paintings on Jackson Pollock’s use of the same technique at the height of his career. As a result, like a type-cast actor, this association has polluted the ability to properly assess her entire oeuvre over the past half-century, though lately this is not without trying.
In 2016 Sobel’s work was included in Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy in London; in 2017 it was included in Outliers and American Vanguard at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; and earlier this year was included in Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Yet, this would seem to indicate that Pollock’s claws are still firmly embedded in Sobel’s legacy because Sobel saw herself, as did the world at her critical peak during the 1940s, as a surrealist. In 1946 she declared, “I’m a surrealist, I paint what I feel within me,” while noted gallerist and curator Sidney Janis said in that same year: “Janet Sobel will probably eventually be known as one of the most important surrealist artists in this country.” But even surrealism, although perhaps more befitting at the time, still doesn’t do justice to what Roberta Smith described as, in her review of an exhibition of Sobel’s works at Gary Snyder Fine Art in New York in 2002, her first in the city in 46 years, “a complex mix of innate Outsider, folk and Surrealist instincts.”
This is because Sobel’s works are complex. The soul of which is far richer and more nuanced than any attempt to now, or then, crowbar her into the cannon of art history by assigning her to one camp or another. Surrealist, primitive artist, outsider artist, Ukrainian folk artist, abstract expressionist, these are all well and good in mapping the visual coordinates that are present in her visual DNA, but they fail to account for Sobel’s idiosyncratic embracement and wide-ranging experimentation with them. Yet over time, this aspect has been eclipsed by unwitting influence on Pollock which has had the damning effect of reducing her artistic output down to a sensationalistic soundbite, a female artist ripped off by male peer, which undoubtedly true, has still done nothing to either move the spotlight on to her work or elevate her work beyond this point. However, London’s Gallery of Everything has staged a valiant attempt to try and rectify this, or at least sow the seeds for this sea change in perception to take place.
Gallery of Everything, London
Their booth at Frieze Masters was dedicated to Sobel, while a concurrent exhibition, Janet Sobel and the 20th Century Women, was on view at their gallery, and situated Sobel among artists Peggy Guggenheim exhibited her alongside in 31 Women in 1945 at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. Across the ground floor and first floor galleries were works by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Hilma af Klint, Alice Neel, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Eva Svankmajerová, to name but a few. Artists most of whom were referred to at that time as primitive or outsider artists, and frequently incorporated a wide gamut of artistic styles at once, surrealism being one of those chiefly employed. Sobel’s works were on their own in the basement allowing for enough detachment when examining them in detail but still encouraging the plentiful overlaps and similarities between them and works on the floors above to be easily seen.
The result was very successful. While it is clear that Sobel is not a technically gifted artist, more than a few of her works either strike-out or lack finesse; there is something undeniably riveting and memorable about her craft, especially when she does hit on it. More remarkable still, is how unpretentious and self-serving they are. During an interview for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sobel stated, “It is not easy to paint. It is very strenuous. But it’s something you’ve got to do if you have the urge.” This perseverance-cum-calling, endearingly at the forefront of the Gallery of Everything’s displays, means that the follies seen in her works register not so much as that, but more as a deeply human portrayal of unadulterated creative compulsion and the plight to placate the insatiable curiosity that stems from it. So, when she does strike on it, the electricity that’s elicited, the excitement and under-dog spirit evoked, feels especially sincere and hard-won.
Janet Sobel untitled, c 1941, oil on canvas 81.3 x 63.5 cm 32 1/8 x 25 in
A striking example of this is the undated Untitled (image above), shown at Frieze Masters. Here, an orgy of naked bodies with different coloured faces is suspended on top of a nondescript background, with snippets of floral elements quietly poking through. What immediately attracts attention is Sobel’s command of space, bringing to mind the Peter Paul Rubens Study for The Fall of the Damned, (c.1614-18), which feels effervescent, and more dream-like than its painted counterpart because of the way Rubens places focus on the bodies, and the sparse background is only given attention when it is needed as a tool to emphasize this. Quickly, the painful-looking contortions of the bodies and facial expressions of the figures in Untitled steal focus, enhancing the work’s enigmatic themes, giving rise to questions about what their relationship is to one another, where they are, and how and why they ended up there. In doing so, our imaginations are pushed to fill in these unknowable answers.
Peter Paul Rubens, Study for the Fall of the Damned; sheet of studies for two groups, in the upper half, men and women pulled down by demons, the lower half represents the group immediately to the left of the former group in the painting, with two pot-bellied men and a fat woman borne down by demons. c.1614-18
Black and red chalk, watercolour and bodycolour, on two sheets conjoined
Sobel didn’t start painting until in or around 1939 when she was 45 years old. As one story goes in the folklore that has grown around her beginnings, Sobel was trying to convince her son Sol who was studying at the Arts Students League in New York, not to drop out from the course, to which he exclaimed: “If you are so interested in art, why don’t you paint?” Another version is that Sobel began drawing over the drawings that Sol brought home from his art classes at the Educational Alliance. In another version, Sobel criticized one of Sol’s paintings, prompting him to throw down his brush and tell her to take up painting herself. While in 1962 Sobel told an interviewer that “she heard a voice tell her she must paint.”
Initially, these paintings were populated by crude-looking figures with cartoonish outlines around their elongated, conical faces, reminiscent of Modigliani’s, their thin eyes often squinting or sad as seen in Untitled (c.1942). Meanwhile, foreground and background dissolve into one another, with trees or other natural features being consumed by dense areas of ornamental flowers as seen in Pro & Contra (1941) while other areas are sectioned off and patterned like herringbone, another foundational feature in her works. But it is the ornamental flowers that are truly what should be considered Sobel’s signature motif and are the lynchpin for her rapid shift into the all-over drip abstraction.
JANET SOBEL, untitled, c 1942, gouache on board, 32.5 x 25 cm, 12 3/4 x 9 7/8 in
At first, they are rendered in a pointillist manner. Yet as they come to dominate more and more of the pictorial surface of Sobel’s works, further moving the images from their figurative roots into more dream-like visions, they also become at times more sophisticated, with elongated brushwork and greater detail. A good example of this (image above) is the small-scale gouache on board Untitled (c 1942), one of Sobel’s best works. On top of a dark green background, they bloom from the bottom right corner and spread across the surface of the image and into the top right and left corners in loud greens, blues, reds, yellows, oranges, pinks and purples, in short, thin cursive brushwork that throughout effortlessly recall the lurid movement of Van Gogh’s later works. While in pockets these crescendo in a calligraphic-like delicacy and in others, revert to a child’s clunky literalness.
Janet Sobel, Artists at the Preview, c 1943, enamel on canvas
Janet Sobel, The Illusion of Solidity , c 1945, oil on canvas, 108.5 x 68.6 cm, 42 3/4 x 27 1/8 in
At Frieze Masters, when a figurative work like Artists at The Preview (c 1943) is viewed next to a drip painting with no figurative elements like The Illusion of Solidity (c 1945), the pointillist brushwork of the flowers in the former, which dominate the image, separating it into segments for the figures to occupy, is seen as being taken to its nth degree logically in the latter. The explosive blossoming effect she produced by densely packing the flowers together, but drawing each flower, in Artists at The Preview, is, by way of dripping paint, given over to the physical nature of it, whereby it also occupies its essence, a feat which undoubtedly opened up interpretive possibilities of works like this to more philosophical ideas, as suggested by the title The Illusion of Solidity.
JANET SOBEL, untitled, c 1946/48 enamel on canvas on board50.8 x 40.6 cm, 20 x 16 in
However, the works that are totally abstract or are much closer to it, like Untitled (c. 1946/1948), noted for its rows of black lines that emanate from the centre like a rib cage (image above), and smudged area of pale pink and black, while at the top two faces poke through, do tend to suffer visually because of lack of dynamism, never quite escaping the rough and readiness of their experimental origins. It’s interesting to note that in Jennifer Higgie’s essay for the exhibition booklet, she quotes Sobel’s granddaughter recalling a time Sobel used a vacuum cleaner to move the paint across the surface. While it is common knowledge that Sobel had already been experimenting with painting on any surface she could find as the moment struck her, scraps of paper, boxes, on the backs of envelopes, cardboard from the dry cleaners, even her granddaughter’s childhood drawings. She used brushes but also other materials that she found around her house like enamel paint and glass pipettes that came from her husband’s costume jewellery business to see how far she could push her ideas and still execute them in reality.
It must be said, though, that probably due to Sobel’s haste in implementing thought into action, she was “bursting with a flow of creativity that couldn’t be stopped,” her granddaughter once recalled during a phone interview, while according to her son, “she would prepare a ground, which would invariably suggest or trigger some ‘idea’ for her, whose sudden conception was matched by an equally rapid execution. In her efforts to pin down her conception she would pour the paint, tip the canvas, and blow the wet lacquer.” There is often a lack of compositional understanding; even in the good The Illusion of Solidity, the white brushwork in the top right corner and yellow that protrudes down from this under the pale pink curls that endlessly snake across the picture are disruptive, throwing off the balance of the work as a whole. While often the colours are not quite what they need to be to qualify them as timeless. The most important factor, however, is scale. Their small scale only magnifies the so-so-ness of them.
Where Sobel is at her best is when figuration and abstraction rub together like tectonic plates, retaining a palpable visual tension but never allowing for an earthquake to happen. It is also in these, where Sobel mines her early life in the Ukraine in an explicit yet deeply codified way. There is a greater glimpse in at Sobel’s interior world which is implicitly understood as being vulnerable, even endearing, if never fully explained. “What does seem obvious is that for her the call to art implied a return in both style and content to the shtetl of your youth,” writes art historian Gail Levin in Janet Sobel: Primitivist, surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist. “Her palette, which is almost always brightly coloured, and her fascination with patterns, ornament, and compositions without empty spaces (which suggests the horror vacui that is typical of many outsider artists) recall Ukrainian Folk Art.” She further reinforces this point by including an anecdote about one of her students, Mariya Tarassishina, a recent Ukrainian emigrant, who, upon seeing Sobel’s work at Gary Snyder Fine Art, began pointing and exclaiming at the specific references she recognized such as female figures wearing vinok z kvitiv, wreaths of flowers worn by unmarried women, strichky, ribbons worn on their own or with flowers, and hystka, a scarf or shawl often worn by married women. Yet, their deeply personal meaning, that being what Sobel articulated only visually and never verbally, as soon as it flashed in her mind’s eye so vividly and powerfully, brings to mind a more interesting comparison if one had to be made: Forrest Bess.
JANET SOBEL untitled, c 1942, gouache on canvas on board, 31.8 x 34.3 cm, 12 1/2 x 13 1/2 in
This is seen at its best in the outstanding gouache on board Untitled (c.1942), depicting three women knitting, with sullen faces and brightly coloured clothes and bandanas. Above floral life, whimsical and magical, and in areas realistically rendered, explode through the earthy brown of unpainted canvas below, areas of which bleed through. Here, Sobel hit’s on it. There is a delicate poise, and the interplay between the more abstracted and figurative elements are like a collision between the twilight romance of Singer Sargent’s garden scenes and the vibrant colours and operatic activation of space in Kandinsky’s paintings, while at the same time the women are brimming with the intricacies of those in Alice Munro’s stories; sadness, fear, survival, identity, tradition. It’s a sumptuously complex work that is also somewhat paired back for Sobel, and if nothing more, illustrates irrefutably that Sobel had and still has plenty more to say.