THE MOST FAMOUS drip painter you’ve never heard of is poised to make a comeback. “Janet Sobel: All-Over” is the first museum exhibition to highlight the abstract canvases for which Ukrainian-Jewish self-taught artist Janet Sobel won acclaim in the New York art world of the 1940s. Anchored at center by the superlative Milky Way, 1945—an edge-to-edge opalescent storm of plums, pinks, and creamy yellows now owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art—this tightly curated show is as bracing and brief as Sobel’s dalliance with fame during her lifetime.
The early canvas Disappointment, ca. 1943, sets the terms of Sobel’s provocative challenge to prevailing art-historical narratives that elevate the production of outsider artists while keeping them at arm’s length from the modernist avant-garde. Pressing against the foreground is an expressive, humanoid landscape in which gnarled tree branches twist into proto-drips encrusted with sand and fields of flowers claustrophobically enrobe haunting, disembodied faces. Sobel collapses figure and ground as motifs inspired by Ukrainian folk art meet a Chagallian, faux-naïf elegance. Is it primitive or modern? How do we choose, and do we have to? 

Sobel was a luminary of abstraction in the United States, and one of its primary innovators. Acclaimed in her lifetime for her skillful use of color and densely layered compositions, she was as voracious in her choice of materials as she was experimental in her methods of application. She oftencombined oil paint, enamel (likely harvested from her family’s jewelry-making business), and resin; mixed in sand to produce a gritty texture; and played with light by sometimes workingon panes of glass. Allowing the liquid pigment to form widewebs and pools, Sobel would then blow it with a pipette, marble wet colors together, and tip the support to manipulate the surface. Such was the level of her originality that Clement Greenberg, the famed critic of Abstract Expressionism, would later remark that Sobel’s output constituted “the first reallyall-over [effect] that I had ever seen.”
 

HOUSTON — In the fall of 1944, the gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim was confident that she’d found the next big thing. “Put Janet Sobel on your list,” she once wrote to a fellow gallerist. “She is the best woman painter by far (in America).” A year later, Guggenheim included Sobel’s work in a group show at her renowned New York gallery Art of This Century, which then hosted the artist’s solo show the following year. Covered in vibrant, dripping colors and web-like layers of texture, Sobel’s groundbreaking paintings attracted the attention of New York’s key critics and artists; in fact, Jackson Pollock created his now-iconic all-over drip paintings sometime after seeing Sobel’s work. But in 1947, at the height of her fame, Sobel left New York and its art scene. Soon after, American art history largely left her behind, too.

Janet Sobel: All-Over at the Menil Collection is a timely, captivating glimpse into this formative but nearly-forgotten figure through 30 of her paintings and drawings. Curated by Natalie Dupêcher and on view through August 11, the exhibition not only presents visitors with the rare opportunity to experience Sobel’s unique work, which broke the mold of mid-century American avant-garde art, but it also raises important questions about the ways that we remember and historicize artists who have long been pushed to the margins.