Janet Sobel
b. Dnipro, Ukraine, 1894–1968
The Attraction of Pink
1945
Oil, enamel, and lacquer on canvas
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund and Gift of Sol and Leah Sobel, 1999 (99.33)
About Museums Without Men
Celebrated art historian Katy Hessel has launched an audio guide series highlighting the women and gender-nonconforming artists in the public collections of international museums. Museums Without Men is an ever-growing series that introduces museum visitors to underrepresented and often lesser-known artists, opening up collections to new and existing audiences who will be able to follow the audio stops while in the galleries or online. The series links public institutions globally, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Tate Britain, London, to foreground the important work that museums and galleries do by collecting and displaying women and gender-nonconforming artists, whether historical or contemporary.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Janet Sobel, The Attraction of Pink (1945). A jewel-like painting comprising swirling and exploding drip painted lines. Looking at The Attraction of Pink by Janet Sobel is like being drawn into another world. It’s like we’re trapped in a constellation of stars up in space, or looking down at seaweed and coral in the depths of the ocean, with ripples of never ending water.
Sobel’s paintings are all consuming. She made them in an automatic manner, which means to create without conscious thought. She let her emotions guide her, and called herself a Surrealist, saying, “I paint what I feel within me.” Born Jennie Olechovsky in now modern day Ukraine, Sobel immigrated to the U.S. with her family after her father was killed in an anti-Semitic pogrom. She came to [00:01:00] art later than most. With no formal training, Sobel took up painting in 1938, aged 45, and initially used her son’s art materials. She painted on scraps of paper, envelopes, cardboard, and seashells she found on her local Brighton beach, and experimented with flurries of abstract gestures and floral patterns reminiscent of Ukrainian folk art.
Now equipped with her new love of painting, she was encouraged to make work by her son, Sol. Sobel was a mother of five, but it was Sol who got her noticed by the New York art world. Within a few years, she was exhibiting at Peggy Guggenheim’s legendary Art of this Century Gallery, alongside European Cubist and Surrealist greats, and was noted by acclaimed gallerist Sidney Janis for her self invented method for applying paint, the [00:02:00] very same method of drip painting that went on to influence some of the most famous names of the abstract expressionist movement.
Here we meet her in 1945, at the height of her career, but her fame was not to last. In 1947, Sobel faded from the spotlight, and the following year, after discovering an allergy to paint, she turned to crayon and pencil. It took until the late 1960s for her name to resurface, with MoMA’s acquisition of Milky Way, but she died soon after, in 1968.
Not even an obituary was written about her, despite the influence she had on art in the 20th century. But now, thanks to where you’re standing, amidst a sea of avant garde works, her name is back where it belongs, to show her forward thinking and revolutionary approaches to [00:03:00] painting.
