Janet Sobel
Paintings from a Photograph and Related Work
September 8 – October 8, 2005
Opening Reception Thursday, September 15 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm

DC Moore Gallery, in association with Gary Snyder Fine Art, is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings by Janet Sobel (1894-1968), best known as the self-taught Brooklyn grandmother whose all-over drip paintings influenced Jackson Pollock. The exhibition focuses on a photograph taken in 1944 by Ben Schnall of Sobel lying on the floor of her Brighton Beach home, surrounded by her paintings. It is these paintings that form the core of the exhibition.

Schnall photographed Sobel and presented the work for reproduction in Life magazine, but it was never used. The photograph shows Sobel painting on the floor, with examples of her paintings on the wall and around the room. It is eerily reminiscent of the famous photographs of Jackson Pollock that were reproduced in Life a few years later, introducing the world to “Jack the Dripper”.

Janet Sobel was born in 1894 in the Ukraine, emigrated to New York in 1908, and married and raised a family of five children before becoming, “one of America’s most talked about surrealist painters…” Completely untrained, Sobel first painted in 1937 at the age of 43. She began with figurative images painted in a primitive style. By 1943 her work had moved into a spontaneous expressionistic style of abstraction that gained her serious admiration among such art world luminaries as Peggy Guggenheim, the surrealists Max Ernst and Andre Breton, the philosopher and educator John Dewey and critic and collector Sidney Janis.

Her first one-person show was at Puma Gallery on West 57th Street in 1944; a short essay about Sobel by John Dewey introduced the checklist. She was in the Women show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1945, and in 1946 Guggenheim gave her a one-person exhibition.

Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock attended the 1946 Peggy Guggenheim exhibition. Greenberg later recalled that after seeing Sobel’s all-over drip paintings, “Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively… The effect, and it was the first really ‘all-over’ one that I had seen, since [Mark ] Tobey’s show came months later, was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.”

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DC Moore Gallery specializes in twentieth century and contemporary art. The gallery is located on the eighth floor of 724 Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5:30. Images can be viewed online by going to www.ModernAmericanArt.com and selecting “Upcoming Exhibitions.” Press viewings can be arranged prior to the exhibition. For more information, for photographs, or to arrange a viewing, please call Sandra Paci at 212-247-2111.