Untitled, 1946

Matte paint, enamel paint, and sand on wood panel
© Estate of Janet Sobel

Janet Sobel was a mother and grandmother when she took up painting in 1939, at the age of forty-five. Using materials belonging to her son, Sol, Sobel painted on anything she could find, including envelopes, paper scraps, and shells scavenged from the beach. Sobel experimented with enamel paint, often mixed with sand—as seen in the granulated surface of Untitled—and adapted glass pipettes from her husband’s costume jewelry business to drip, splatter, and blow paint in all over compositions. In 1958 the critic Clement Greenberg acknowledged that Sobel’s innovative work had “made an impression” on Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), relating that the pioneering Abstract Expressionist had admired her paintings. Yet just as Sobel was establishing herself, she fell into obscurity: the artist moved to New Jersey in 1946 to be closer to her husband’s business, and her inability to drive left her isolated.