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Janet Sobel (May 31, 1893 – November 11, 1968), born Jennie Olechovsky (occ. Lechovsky), was a Ukrainian-born American Abstract Expressionist Painting who pioneered the drip painting technique; her work directly influenced Jackson Pollock. She was credited as exhibiting the first instance of all-over painting seen by Clement Greenberg, a notable art critic. Her career started mid-life, at age forty-five in 1938.
Sobel presented her first solo show at Puma Gallery in New York in 1944. Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel's work in the show Women in her The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945, alongside the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Kay Sage. The following year, she invited her for a solo show at the same space, the brochure for the show was written by Sidney Janis.
From 1943 through 1946, Janet Sobel became a powerful presence in the New York art world. She exhibited in the 27th Annual at the Brooklyn Museum in 1943 (she would also exhibit there in 1944 and 1945).
In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum. (2025). 9780300208429, Denver Art Museum Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300208429
Her work is extraordinarily free from inventiveness and from self-consciousness and pretense. One can believe that to an unusual degree her forms and colors well up from a subconsciousness that is richly stored with sensitive impressions received directly from contact with nature, impressions which have been reorganized in figures in which color and form are happily wed.John Dewey, Janet Sobel, Puma gallery, leaflet catalogue, New York, April 24 to May 14, 1944.
Sobel used music for inspiration and stimulation of her feelings into her canvas. She listened to music while she painted. "There was a radio in each of the four rooms of her Brighton Beach apartment, and they played Janet's favorite songs. The music helped to put her in a trance where, armed with a brush, she could discover more and more secret rooms in her subconscious."Lozhkina, Alisa. "Journey to the Self: Janet Sobel." Janet Sobel: Wartime, The Ukrainian Museum, New York, 2023. Sobel's works exemplify the tendency to fill up every empty space, sometimes interpreted as horror vacui. She often depicted her feelings through past experiences. Her depiction of soldiers with cannons and imperial armies, as well as traditional Jewish families, reflected the experiences of her childhood. Her figures often demonstrated the time of the Holocaust, where she relived the trauma of her youth. Overcoming those youthful traumas, Sobel found a safe realm for her imagination through art.
Sobel's paintings were characterized as belonging to "the realms of surrealism and primitivism." "Sobel was part folk artist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist, but critics found it easiest to call her a 'primitive'." As Zalman summarizes, her title of "primitive" was "a category that enabled her acceptance by the art world, but restricted her artistic development". Grouping Sobel as a 'primitive' painter was part of a greater movement to try to form a unique American form of art, distinct from European art, while still trying to maintain a hierarchy of 'us and them'. Sobel was grouped as inferior due to being a housewife, while other painters could have been dismissed as being mentally inferior in some way. In a way, Sobel also serves as a representative of this conflict. Due to the attitudes of some of the critics of her day, Sobel became known as a suburban housewife who, working professionally as an artist, inspired the feminist conversation around domestic roles of women.
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