Janet Sobel at Gary Snyder - New York - Brief Article

Ukrainian-born Janet Sobel (1894-1968), a Brooklyn housewife who started painting at 43, enjoyed a brief period of renown in the mid-1940s for her drip paintings. Peggy Guggenheim exhibited her work at Art of This Century Gallery, where Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock saw it in 1946; other admirers included John Dewey and Sidney Janis. These abstract paintings were preceded and followed by her less-known primitive, figurative works. Revealing a more complete picture of her art, this exhibition of 47 works at Gary Snyder included examples from the early 1940s to the early '50s, although scholarship dealing with pieces from the later years is scant.

The earliest paintings in the show were dark and ominous war pictures from around 1941. These small crowded gouaches show scenes of marching, uniformed men and broadly painted, flat, wasp-waisted women. A more upbeat series, in which brightly colored palm trees, beach-going figures, dancers, flowers and other natural forms fill the paper, was probably inspired by several trips Sobel took to Florida after she started painting.

An untitled oil-on-paperboard still life (ca. 1942) depicting a vase of flowers on a table evokes Matisse. Richly patterned drapery is accented on the left by her signature webbed markings, here brick red, resembling a rib cage. The imagery in Sobel's work changed over the years, possibly influenced by her son's art studies. Her densely packed pictures of floating figures, heads, roses, poppies and other vegetation suggest Russian folk motifs. Sobel experimented with materials, sometimes using sand, fake pearls and glossy enamel paint from her husband's costume-jewelry business. Evidence of her home-grown methods can be found in the alligatored texture of some of her pieces, where she may have layered enamel paint before the undercoat dried.

In the 48-by-26 1/2-inch Illusion of Solidity (ca. 1945), she abandoned recognizable imagery and achieved an abstract luminosity by judiciously dripping and pouring thin marks in layers of pink, yellow, aqua and black; in this work she combined oil, lacquer and enamel over a comb-textured undercoat on canvasboard. A later untitled abstraction (ca. 1946-48) features bolder, heavier blobs and linear networks in blood red and black; the thickness of the markings belies the work's small dimensions and relates to the paint expressively poured by Pollock.

A small, allover, crayon-and-poured-enamel painting from ca. 1948 suggests a transition for Sobel; two black ovals with almond-shaped eyes indicate faces, foretelling her renewed interest in figuration. Around 1946, she developed a paint allergy and switched to brightly colored crayons. She colored in her spaces with linear fish-scales and other textures and patterns similar to those used by now widely admired outsider artists, such as Martin Ramirez. This small retrospective showed Sobel to be a compelling painter beyond her historically significant poured works.

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