Janet Sobel

1893-1968 · Brooklyn, New York, USA

A Brooklyn grandmother with no training dripped and poured enamel across canvases in her flat. Jackson Pollock saw them, and admitted they made an impression.

The life

Born Jenny Lechovsky in Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro, Ukraine, Sobel emigrated to Brooklyn in 1908 after her father was killed in a pogrom. She married, raised five children, and began painting around 1937, already a grandmother, encouraged by her son Sol. Between 1943 and 1946 New York took notice: a solo show at Puma Gallery, inclusion in Peggy Guggenheim’s The Women in 1945, and a solo at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1946. Clement Greenberg recorded that Pollock admitted her pictures had made an impression on him. The art world moved on; she kept painting in New Jersey until her death in 1968.

The work

Oil, enamel and household paints poured, dripped and blown across canvas and board: all-over fields of lacy white writing over jewel-toned grounds, with faces and flowers surfacing from Ukrainian folk memory. Her Milky Way of 1945, made before Pollock’s drip paintings, is now in the Museum of Modern Art, with other works at the Whitney and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Why we love them

Art history spent fifty years calling her a footnote to Pollock. It was the wrong way round: she got there first, in a Brighton Beach living room.

Go deeper

• Janet Sobel at the Outsider Art Fair
• Janet Sobel on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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